Language as Math

Maybe it's because I'm old and crotchety (actually, I AM old and crotchety, no 'maybe' about it) but I'm nearly out of patience with how we use language to obscure meaning rather than enhance it. I read years ago about an incoming class at a university with a large number of the freshmen-to-be class considering themselves 'Native Americans.' The university administrators tried pulling the string on this survey to better understand what courses they were taking and (more on point) why so few of the class offerings on Indigenous Peoples Studies had registrants.

Turns out, as I've understood the tale, many of those answering the questionnaire understood themselves, as people born in the United states, to be 'Native Americans'. They didn't realize the terms when paired meant something entirely different when used separately. We have a sort of converse situation in my house. My two children were born in Germany and their mom is a German citizen so they can linger for a moment on questionnaires and be hyphenated Americans (kind of) and justify it more easily than friends and acquaintances they both have. What are words worth?

There's a moment in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 where Captain Yossarian watches someone apprehended by the police and the man keeps shouting out, 'Help! Police!' Yossarian finds this amusing since the police are already there and arresting him. Then it dawns on him that perhaps the fellow is shouting out a warning to everyone else about where the danger may lie. Sounds like a verse from the book of Humpty-Dumpty, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean-no more and no less." HD's got a good point about verbs--and I think this President would support his position on the virtues of impenetrability. But he's not alone, of course.

We have elected officials at all levels (and, in fairness, let's include those who'd like to be elected officials at all levels) who will tell us today whatever we have indicated in a poll or survey that we want to hear. And we had a previous President who had his own difficulties with defining words and if you said the secret word, with apologies to Groucho, you got a cigar (or he did, I've almost forgotten). The Surgeon General had yet to field a division so the watch words, 'smoke 'em if you got 'em' could be said aloud.

And while I hope we use language to build bridges rather than walls, I recall Peter Gabriel's reminder that "there's safety in numbers, when you learn to divide." This is, as you know, a Presidential election year-as well as all the seats in the House of Representatives and (I think) a third of the Senate and all the state and local elections across our Experiment in Democracy We Call a Nation (EIDWCAN) so we need to watch and listen to the words and the silences of those who seek our support.
There are different branches of Arithmetic: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. They're pretty devastating when used separately-in combination, they can be pretty or lethal or both.
-bill kenny