INTERPOLATION
Garner’s aside about linguists’ writing has wider applications, though ADMAU mostly keeps them implicit. The truth is that most US academic prose is appalling — pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogaba-line, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead. See textual INTERPOLATION much below. (back to text)
26 (which is in fact true)(back to text)
27 (Q.v. the “Pharmakon” stuff in Derrida’s La dissémination — but you’d probably be better off just trusting me.) (back to text)
28 Standard Written English (SWE) is sometimes called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the basic inditement-emphasis is the same. See for example The Little, Brown Handbook’s definition of Standard English as “the English normally expected and used by educated readers and writers.”
SEMI–INTERPOLATION
Plus let’s note that Garner’s preface explicitly characterizes his dictionary’s intended audience as “writers and editors.” And even the recent ads for ADMAU in organs like the New York Review of Books are built around the slogan “If you like to WRITE… Refer to us.” * (back to text)
29 Granted, some sort of 100 percent compendious real-time Megadictionary might conceivably be possible online, though it would take a small army of lexical webmasters and a much larger army of in situ actual-use reporters and surveillance techs; plus it’d be GNP-level expensive (… plus what would be the point?). (back to text)
30New Criticism refers to T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks and Wimsatt & Beardsley and the whole autotelic Close Reading school that dominated literary criticism from the Thirties to well into the Seventies. (back to text)
31 (“EVIDENCE OF CANCER LINK REFUTED BY TOBACCO INSTITUTE RESEARCHERS”) (back to text)
32 This proposition is in fact true, as is interpolatively demonstrated just below, and although the demonstration is persuasive it is also, as you can see from the size of this FN, lengthy and involved and rather, umm, dense, so that once again you’d maybe be better off simply granting the truth of the proposition and forging on with the main text.
INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE
It is sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a private language. Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example; and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that for me the word pain has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism. Eating Chips Ahoy! and staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck by the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color-experiences at alclass="underline" the fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color-experiences of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color-experiences is the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and that what we “mean” by the word blue is what he “means” by green, etc. etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a. p.-s. ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.
The point here is that the idea of a private language, like private colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.
In the case of private language, the delusion is usually based on the belief that a word like pain or tree has the meaning it does because it is somehow “connected” to a feeling in my knee or to a picture of a tree in my head. But as Mr. L. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations proved in the 1950s, words actually have the meanings they do because of certain rules and verification tests that are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenstein’s argument centers on the fact that a word like tree means what it does for me because of the way the community I’m part of has tacitly agreed to use tree. What makes this observation so powerful is that Wittgenstein can prove that it holds true even if I am an angst-ridden adolescent pot-smoker who believes that there’s no way I can verify that what I mean by tree is what anybody else means by tree. Wittgenstein’s argument is very technical but goes something like:
(1) A word has no meaning apart from how it is actually used, and even if
(2) “The question of whether my use agrees with others has been given up as a bad job,”* still,
(3) The only way a word can be used meaningfully even to myself is if I use it “correctly,” with
(4) Correctly here meaning “consistently with my own definition” (that is, if I use tree one time to mean a tree and then the next time turn around and use tree to mean a golf ball and then the next time willy-nilly use tree to mean a certain brand of high-cal corporate cookie, etc., then, even in my own little solipsistic universe, tree has ceased really to “mean” anything at all), but
(5) The criterion of consistency-with-my-own-definition is satisfiable only if there exist certain rules that are independent of any one individual language-user (viz., in this case, me). Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.” Wittgenstein’s basic way of putting it is: Now how is it to be decided whether I have used the [privately defined] word consistently? What will be the difference between my having used it consistently and its seeming to me that I have? Or has this distinction vanished?… If the distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘seems correct’ has disappeared, then so has the concept correct. It follows that the ‘rules’ of my private language are only impressions of rules. My impression that I follow a rule does not confirm that I follow the rule, unless there can be something that will prove my impression correct. “And that something cannot be another impression — for this would be as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”
Step (5) is the real kicker; step (5) is what shows that even if the involuted adolescent decides that he has his own special private definition of tree, he himself cannot make up the “rules of consistency” via which he confirms that he’s using tree the way he privately defined it — i.e., “The proof that I am following a rule must appeal to something independent of my impression that I am.”