There is a basic textbook on “marketing” (the skills of placing goods and services in the marketplace and getting them known, bought and utilized) which bogs large numbers of its readers and is responsible for much noncomprehension of the subject. Research to trace why this was so, found in the very first paragraphs that it refused to define the word “marketing” and even said that it was anything you could make of it.
![[Picture]](img/Pg54_1.jpg)
The effect on the student was to not make anything of it! He would hang up in the first paragraphs of the book and fail to assimilate what is factually a very interesting and useful subject.
So hidden were these misunderstood words – as the person’s reaction to them was a blank if not an aversion – that the difficulties they caused went unnoticed.
In the field of education, a series of classes all in the same school (a white school in Johannesburg, South Africa), were given intelligence tests and it was found that the further the child “progressed” in school the lower his intelligence became. The children of eight, for instance, attained intelligence grades far, far better than the children of thirteen – all in the same school. The texts abounded in not-defined words. Such a circumstance could be avoided by a thorough and rigorous campaign to fully define words used.
To use a word, one should know its meaning or which of its many meanings one intends and then use it that way. Almost any civilized language has a very broad vocabulary available; almost any nuance of meaning can be expressed.
Such people as the flatboat men of the Mississippi and rough-and-tumble cowboys of the Western United States, in the nineteenth century, developed a fad of using the most polysyllabic and improbable words in their utterances.
They did it to impress, emphasize and overwhelm. Undoubtedly it had its uses, especially in quarrels. And it is to be noted that the principal pastime of the period was fighting. Violence of utterance cannot substitute for knowing what one is talking about.
Propagandists in the current century have developed a whole technique for redefining words so as to bend a population more toward their pattern of thinking. George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 contains some remarkable examples. Quite a few such examples can be found in modern school texts. “Liberty” becomes “the right to wear chains.” Such a trend is a disreputable part of the natural evolution of language.
For language evolves and language changes. Chaucer wrote poems in English around six hundred years ago and the language now is so different that one has to take a course in Chaucerian English to read them in the original. The plays of Shakespeare are currently drifting into average incomprehensibility due to the evolution of language in the last three and a half centuries. And for that matter, a modern soldier might have difficulty discussing military matters with a veteran of World War II.
Words and terms change or the meaning may change while the word apparently is the same. “Whore” meant only “dear” in earlier times. Thus it behooves an originator of communications to keep himself studied, up-to-date, and conversant with the common parlance. Otherwise what he intends to say might be received in quite some other way.
|Related Sites |