Use and Abuse of Language

Written 2025 by Steven Lewis

Language allows us to communicate with each other and to talk silently to ourselves. It allows us to inform, persuade and to deceive ourselves and others. Language is a powerful tool and we would benefit from a deeper appreciation of its uses and abuses.

Alfred Korzybski was most interested in the use of language to map our world, ourselves included. If a map is not its territory, then the only relationship must be structural. Maps that are similar in structure to a territory give us predictability. Maps that deviate from the territory lead us astray. Korzybski extended this analogy to languages and concluded that the only relationship between what we say and the subject of our speech must be structural, understood not merely as static structure but also as dynamic structure, such as function. He then set out to investigate how the structure of our language, both inherited and individually produced, can mislead and persuade us.

We inherit a primary structure of language that includes fundamental symbols like letters and numbers, a common vocabulary and the rules for assembling these building blocks into higher order structures like sentences and paragraphs. The primary structure of different languages can vary by their alphabet, phonemes, vocabularies, the relation of nouns to each other and to verbs, gender inclusion, time integration .... Vocabularies of people with a common language can vary with their location and experience. For example, natives of a desert region would have little use for words about trees and snow. Even in a temperate region a tree is a tree for many residents. Arborists, however, have many different names for trees. Similarly, for most people blue is blue. Painters need many names for blue -- cyan, turquois, navy, midnight, sapphire, cobalt ....

Humans use the primary structure of their language to create secondary structures in the form of books, lectures, advertisements, gossip ... to describe, inform, educate, persuade, manipulate, deceive, obscure, entertain and attack. Korzybski's magnum opus, Science and Sanity, is a unique assemblage of terms intended to convey specific meanings to the reader. If the reader understands and assimilates its content it will change the way they evaluate. When we use language we must choose which words to assemble into higher order structures that will best serve our interests in a particular context. For example, supporters may label armed rebels "freedom fighters" while opponents call them "terrorists." Some call those who sneak into a country "illegal aliens," others call them "undocumented immigrants." What some call "torture," those sympathetic to the practice call it "enhanced interrogation. "

We use language to assemble the elements into a string of words of specific structure. Changing the structure, which includes choice of letters, words or the context in which they are generated and presented, can trigger different interpretations.

For example, "The batter hit the ball." and "The ball hit the batter."
The two sentences have the same words but different meanings due to their different structure.

Compare "I want to lose him" with "I want to love him."
A change in the structure by one letter out of 14 yields a major change in the meaning.

Attorney to Judge: "The sentence is too long."
English teacher to student: "The sentence is too long."
Notice the two quoted sentences are the same, but the different context (structural surroundings) produces very different meanings.

Language Structure and Persuasion

Major advertisers do market research to determine which language structures and displays promote the most sales. There are marketing reasons for saying "75% lean beef" instead of "25% fat beef," or "pre-owned cars" instead of "used cars," or "relative risk" (20% fewer deaths) instead of "absolute risk" (4 deaths instead of 5). There are reasons why "only" appears before a price (only $99) and why most grocery store prices end in "9." In the marketing world the word "save" is used as a synonym for "buy." ("The more you buy, the more you save.") These are tried and true linguistic manipulations to persuade you to do something you might otherwise not do.

Korzybski's General Semantics

A major goal of Korzbyski in formulating General Semantics was to encourage postponing our pre-established reactions in a novel context in order to search for additional details that might change our evaluation. This would include how we respond to the language of others as well as how carefully we construct our own language.

Korzybski evaluated language primarily in terms of its intensional (by definition) vs extensional (by fact) structure. He noted that the common use of a term like "tree" in English brings to awareness similarities such as are found in a dictionary definition, but on objective levels we deal with individual trees with differences -- the principle of individuality. We need general terms like "tree" (higher order abstractions) to speak about similar entities, but we need also to remember that the items labeled similarly are different. To emphasize differences over similarities Korzybski recommended overt (public) or covert (internal) indexing to counteract the intensional structure of language. Instead of labeling each unique entity "tree" we can use indexes (tree1, tree2, tree3) to remind us of differences. Korzybski also recommended non-verbal therapies, such as silently investigating similar objects to make note of subtle differences. Thoroughly evaluating differences among trees could help you avoid regretting the purchase of a "tree" after it becomes a neighborhood nuisance.

However, neither "tree" nor "tree1" reminds us that trees are continuously changing. Tree1 that we planted in our yard in 2000 may be quite satisfying in 2010 but by 2025 it may be a neighborhood nuisance, clogging your sewer line, heaving your pavement and filling the gutters of your home and your neighbor's. So Korzybski recommended dating our statements, at least internally, to remind us that objects and people differ through time.

We can also index our terms and statements with reference to nearby relations or context. A tree shading your home during the mid-day summer sun can be quite beneficial. That same tree during a windstorm could punch a hole in your roof and take down your power line.

Habitually indexing overtly or covertly by individuality, date and context can keep us alert for important differences to help us properly evaluate any situation.

Korzybski introduced the term "elementalistic" to refer to words that make it difficult for us to understand our world. If structure is the only content of knowledge then relational words are more enlightening than isolationist terms. For example, we've inherited terms like "mind" and "senses." Korzybski recommended replacing these by relational terms, such as "orders of abstraction." Senses become "lower order abstractions" and "mind" becomes "higher order abstractions." "Abstraction" is a functional term implying non-allness -- details left out -- and so reminds us that we can never observe or know "all" and so we need to be watchful for new details that may change our evaluations. Korzybski suggested the use of "etc" to remind us and our audience of details left out. We can also use elipses ... for the same purpose.

"Mind" and "body" were inherited from a time when one was considered separate from the other. Later terms like psycho-somatic imply a more structurally correct interaction, not isolation, between higher and lower-order functions. Similarly, terms like "space" and "time," "thinking" and "behaving," and "thinking" and "feeling" imply a separateness that cannot be found in reality. Korzybski noted that the fusion of space and time into space-time by Minkowski revolutionized physics in the early 20th Century. Meanwhile, "thinking" and "behaving" became covert (hidden) behavior and overt (observable) behavior to psychologists like Joseph Wolpe. Korzybski's semantic reactions fused "thinking" with "feeling."

Korzybski also criticized the primary structure of Indo-European languages leading to the uncritical use of the term "is" to link an individual to a group or to ascribe characteristics to an object. We may be told that "Gabriel is a Jew." Those who have negative semantic reactions to the term "Jew" and who don't spontaneously index the word "Jew" will project characteristics upon Gabriel that may be unrepresentative due to nudging from the little term "is."

Or you may hear someone playing a new popular song and say "That song is awful." With the help of the word "is" you have projected your feelings onto the song. It may be awful to you, but as a popular song it is most likely enjoyed by many others. So the song must not be awful in itself. Instead, awful is a reaction in you to the song. If you say "I hate that song" then you are using a language structure that better maps the territory, placing your evaluation inside you instead of projecting it outside of you. Others can disagree with you, even argue, if you say "That song is awful," but no one can disagree with you when you say "I hate that song."

Another limitation we inherit with our language is a tendency to evaluate in extremes known as "either-or" or "two-valued orientation." We are told "either you are pregnant or you're not." There are no 'shades of gray.' Yet in our laws we recognize degrees of pregnancy and allow a woman to legally abort a pregnancy in its early stages but forbid it in its later stages unless the life of the mother is at risk.

This tendency toward two-valued orientations most likely arises from our attentiveness to extremes -- it's day or night, cold or hot, tall or short, pregnant or not -- as well as too few nouns to label intermediates and an aversion to mathematics. When I was a youngster the weather forecast was typically presented as either rain or no rain tomorrow. By the 1970s forecasters were speaking mostly in terms of the probability of rain when presenting their forecasts, which brought them some criticism for 'hedging their bets.'

We need to evaluate in terms of probability -- Korzybski's "infinite-valued orientation" -- for we live in a world where we cannot know "all" (hence Korzybski's universal use of the term "abstracting") and where one cause acting alone is often not sufficient to bring about a particular effect. We are told, for example, that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, yet most cigarette smokers never develop lung cancer. So we should say "cigarette smoking increases your risk (probability) of developing lung cancer."

Steven Pinker, Ph.D.

What I have said so far may seem reasonable, even obvious. But if you are a sophisticated scholar you may find yourself in intense disagreement. For example, Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of many popular books. He wrote "The Language Instinct" published in 1994 in which he presents a misleading caricature of General Semantics on pages 56 and 57. Let's review the structure of his language.

"In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine thoughts. Inspired by Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language," pundits accuse governments of manipulating our minds with euphemisms like pacification (bombing), revenue enhancement (taxes), and nonretention (firing) ....

"The most extreme of these movements is General Semantics, begun in 1933 by the engineer Count Alfred Korzybski and popularized in long-time best-sellers by his disciples Stuart Chase and S. I. Hayakawa .... General Semantics lays the blame for human folly on insidious "semantic damage" to thought perpetrated by the structure of language. Keeping a forty-year-old in prison for a theft he committed as a teenager assumes that the forty-year-old John and the eighteen-year-old John are "the same person," a cruel logical error that would be avoided if we referred to them not as John but as John 1972 and John 1994, respectively. The verb to be is a particular source of illogic, because it identifies individuals with abstractions, as in Mary is a woman, and licenses evasions of responsibility, like Ronald Reagan's famous nonconfession Mistakes were made. One faction seeks to eradicate the verb altogether ....

"But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications."

In most circumstances it would be a waste of public resources to keep a 40-something in prison for a theft committed as a teenager. The legal system recognizes that our behaviors (overt and covert) evolve from our teenager years through adulthood. Dr. Pinker's language structure -- his prose -- is a great example of how the use of language can mislead because it is not similar in structure to the territory. Nowhere did Korzybski claim that "language determines thought" or that "thought is the same thing as language." Instead, Korzybski encouraged his students to practice 'thinking' non-verbally by practicing silence on the objective levels, to observe silently before labeling, and to visualize relations. By practicing non-verbal 'thinking' we can free our observational and creative skills from the biases of our language. Behavior therapists treating patients often find it necessary to teach a patient to change how they speak to themselves and to others in order to relieve them from their misery.

Pinker uses the term "determinism" in relation to language and thought in a cartoonish one-valued sense, as if Korzybski claimed a particular language structure will elicit the same response in all people. Korzybski used "determinism" in a many-valued sense. For example, we have dozens of migraine medicines available for treating migraine. Why so many? Because none of them work satisfactorily for every migrainer, and some that do work for you may have intolerable adverse reactions -- the principle of individuality that Pinker seems to belittle. Suppose you try a migraine drug without success and say "this drug is no good." Korzybski would suggest abandoning the "is" and constructing a more structurally correct verbal map -- "this drug didn't work for me."

Marketers, pollsters, political consultants and psychologists (but apparently not Dr. Pinker 1994) have studied the effects of different language structures on individuals and have found that how you say it and the context in which you say it will have varying effects on others. Even how you are dressed can affect the response of your audience. Old-time cigarette ads often featured a distinguished-looking actor dressed in a white coat and wearing a stethoscope or head mirror to nudge observers into believing smoking may be good for their health.

Pollsters know that you can change the results of a survey by tweaking the structure of the language of the survey questions. Even the order of the questions can affect the results of a survey. Ask a group of movie-goers "how long was the movie" and they will on average (probability!) estimate a longer length than if you asked them "how short was the movie?".

In conclusion, the structure of a language, inherited and applied, has isolated societies (the Tower of Babel), revolutionized biology (The Origin of Species), brought destruction to a continent (Mein Kemp) and civil liberties to many (U.S. Constitution).

Resources:

General Semantics Home Page ||| Steven Lewis Home Page