- KSE
JL’s comments on Freddie’s comments on Stephen Fry’s thoughts on language afford me an opportunity to link to what I believe to be one of the best sketch comedy pieces ever committed to tape (the very sketch Fry refers to in his own piece), from two of the greatest comedic minds of the last 25 years:
If you’re not incapacitated by the time Fry gets to the “hulk of a charred Panzer” I’m afraid there’s no hope for you.
But Freddie doesn’t believe this to be any laughing matter, and I agree with him that to lose specificity and the ability to discriminate with language would be a terrible thing. I just don’t think it’s happening. JL is right that it would be bad if, through the evolution of language, torture were reduced to enhanced interrogation. But is that reduction really occurring?
We are by now accustomed to hearing that the experience of living in a social order is largely constituted by the language in which we articulate that experience, but the truth is the the two (the experience and the language) are mutually constitutive. Eliminating the term “torture” from our discourse (and bear in mind, this is a long way from happening) may have any number of detrimental effects, but one thing it will not do is conclusively eliminate the experience of torture. There is a qualitative difference between being grilled by Vincent D’Onofrio and having bamboo shoots shoved underneath your fingernails, and not just because we say so, but because there simply is and always will be for anyone experiencing the two.
Torture is an extreme case, but I think Freddie’s fears are misplaced even in the less-incendiary case of “anticipate” vs. “expect.” It may be irritating to be surrounded by imprecise language (and I may change my tune when I start grading papers and final exams in the coming weeks), but I see no reason to fear that the need for precision will never be finally excised from language. Human experience is endless in its variety, and individuals will always need ways to articulate that variety not just to express it to other people, but to make it coherent and understandable to themselves. Language will continue to change as we use it, even for the most stauch defenders of current (or past) usage. Losses in some areas will be compensated for by gains in others.
While I won’t go as far as Fry and advocate open contempt for orthography, I do hope we always maintain a certain amount of mushiness in language. After all, that’s what makes humor possible in the first place.
There is more to be said on this topic, and a great deal more to be said on one closely related, which is the increasingly popular “linguistic analogy” in moral psychology. If I can find the time there will be more to come on this in the coming days, along with a rant or two about Jon Stewart if he continues to say stupid things.
Filed under: torture
One problem (in a sense) is that most of those who talk about torture don’t actually HAVE to experience it …
What if changes in language erect a wall of separation between qualitative experience and our descriptive terminology? Precise language allows us to convey accurate meaning to an audience that may not have personally experienced the action in question. If, for example, we replace torture with a series of wishy-washy euphemisms, we’ve lost the ability to convey the horror of the practice to people who are already detached from its actual implementation. That, I think, is the danger of euphemism.
I didn’t make this clear in my post, but I’m certainly not advocating that we all acquiesce to eliminating “torture” from our vocabulary. My point is just that the battle is far from over. My understanding is that even those who don’t agree that waterboarding is torture probably believe something qualifies as torture. It is not a dead category, and we can still argue with such people about what practices the word should describe for us.
I guess my point is that I agree there is danger in euphemism, but that we shouldn’t despair that we’ve lost the resources to fight against it.
So I’m not worried about the public. I am worried, however, about the poor young men who are being asked to carry out these interrogations. For their sake (and of course, also for the sake of the people being tortured) we must fight to maintain the distinction between interrogation and torture. But to do this we shouldn’t simply argue that language ought not to be flexible or change over time. We should accept that it can and does and argue that torture is a constant in spite of this fact about language.
I guess that what I would say is the more dangerous possibility is not the loss of precision through common usage, but a deliberate attempt to eliminate precision — as in, when we refuse to talk about the matter as such. Or when people of authority say, “It’s not A, it’s B,” when it’s clearly A and they’ve just made B up.
[...] Jump to Comments Having re-read Kyle Erickson’s post on language and finally gotten to Fry’s entry on the subject, I’ve belatedly realized there’s [...]
I just stumbled onto this conversation, and I’m fascinated. I don’t necessarily know that the flexibility of language is the issue (or a problem); I prefer to think of it as specificity. The answer to a question depends in part on what the question is, of course, and in the case of torture, we’ve too little asked, “What IS it?” And when it does get asked, it gets answered with political obfuscations or juridical definitions. In fact, the grammar of the legal language to which the left has consistently turned to defend its anti-torture stance doesn’t always do that much to really answer the question.
It’s at heart an epistemological problem. Elaine Scarry put it best: “To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that someone else has pain is to have doubt.”
At the risk of being obnoxiously self-promotional, here’s my own personal exercise in tackling the epistemological problem of defining torture by starting where it starts, with the body. It’s journalism, though. so it’s also supposed to be interesting, and with smaller (if not fewer) words than I’ve used here: Reading the Wounds.
Excited to find this conversation happening.
Can we not, perhaps, also make the positive case for fuzziness in language by pointing to the ability to utilize different combinatins of words in different ways to as to better highlight and express what we mean in certain instances. As different experiences emerge we don’t necessarily have new words to describe those experiences but can still reorganize the use of common words in such a way as to point to the subjective component of the experience via the signifiers that have common, yet malleable, meanings.
In this regard, while the loss of specificity in language might be something over which consternation is appropriate, there is a converse benefit in communicating that we realize. Such a flexibility might have useful political applications insofar as nefarious euphemisms can, themselves, be co-opted to highlight the underlying thinking from which they given that we might find wanting. Can we not take the phrase, “enhanced interrogation techniques” and deconstruct the intended meaning of such a phrase to reveal a particular way of seeing the world that seeks to justify unacceptable practices via the use of words that seem to circumnavigate the experience to which they are pointing.
In other words, in a certain sense doesn’t this fuzziness cut both ways?