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Misunderstandings about language:

A historical overview
Jean Aitchison
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
In the 21st century, attitudes to language have (rightly) become a lively eld of
interest, and Johnson is to be congratulated on a thought-provoking paper.
This response is not so much a point-by-point reply to Johnson's paper, as an
attempt to esh out the background to some of the ideas which she introduced.
It highlights areas which need to be scrutinized if we are to satisfactorily
account for the gap between expert and lay knowledge on language. In
particular, it argues that a historical overview is required if we are to understand linguistic misunderstandings. It also points out that not only the public,
but linguists too have been `brainwashed' into false beliefs.
Three areas in particular will be highlighted:
1. History of public views on language. Strong opinions have been aired for
several centuries. Johnson refers to a long-standing `complaints tradition',
yet does not investigate the matter further. She implies that it has always
been present (probably true). Yet dierent centuries have had dierent
concerns, which have been handed down to us, and have aected current
day views. Johnson suggests that we need to explore the construction of the
expert/lay knowledge divide. Yet this can only be done if we look at the
history of public views on language. At times when public literacy was fairly
low, and understanding of language virtually non-existent, a few `opinion
makers' had a surprisingly powerful inuence. Strong views were put
forward by those in authority, and these ideas have achieved the status of
a `folk tradition'. The power of this must not be underestimated. In contrast,
debates on the Public Understanding of Science do not have to contend with
this long tradition even though some long-standing ideas are detectable in
cliches such as black mood, livid with anger, which refer back to old ideas of
`four humours'.
2. Attitudes of linguists to public views on language. These have in the past
mostly been dismissive. Johnson points out that scientists, including
linguists, have `almost without exception worked with a decit view,
which blamed the public for its purported scientic illiteracy'. She argues
(convincingly) for a move away from this decit view. Yet the reasons for its
longstanding maintenance require investigation.
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3. Linguists' own views on language. Many linguists have falsied, and still
falsify, ideas on language, because of unrecognized preconceptions. Johnson
hints at this when she notes: `Nonlinguists, it seems, know something which
many linguists . . . are reluctant to accept, namely, that it is . . . nigh
impossible to separate the facts . . . of language from the cultural values with
which they are saturated'. These covert prejudices need to be made overt.
A successful exercise in metalinguistics (exploration of views about language)
does not of course guarantee attitude change: that was a classic aw of
psychoanalysis, a belief that understanding led to altered views. But it is a
useful rst step in self-awareness. An ultimate goal may be to try and change
attitudes, though this is more problematical.
The discussion below is organized into sections following the three points
raised above.
1. HISTORY OF PUBLIC VIEWS ON LANGUAGE
Value judgments about language have been expressed for a very long time. For
centuries, some varieties of English have been promoted as superior to others
though the values have shifted from century to century. One of the earliest
recorded opinions comes from 1193, when Gerald of Wales praised `purity' of
dialect, which he associated with `the southern parts of England, and especially
Devon' (Gerald of Wales 1193/1984: 231). Geographical location is again
specied in George Puttenham's famous statement that the English which
should be emulated was:
the vsual speech of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London
within lx.myles, and not much above . . . (Puttenham 1589/1936)

A desire for quality, closely associated with `purity' has therefore existed for
centuries. This interacted with a craving for `xity' (see Milroy, this issue). The
variation and changeability of English appeared to contrast with the supposed
permanence of Latin. Accordingly, repeated calls were made to purify and x
the English language. For example, Thomas Sprat urged in 1667 that `some
sober and judicious Men, should take the whole Mass of our Language into their
hands . . . and would set a mark on the ill Words; . . . and admit, and establish
the good' (Sprat 1667/1958: 42).
From a dierent angle, philosophers joined in with views on language. The
17th century thinker John Locke claimed in his inuential `Essay concerning
human understanding' (1690) that language was primarily for the transfer of
information, asserting that ` . . . language is the great conduit, whereby men
convey their discoveries, reasonings, and knowledge from one to another'. This
conduit metaphor was probably based on Locke's admiration for London's
recently installed water supply. Locke's inuence has been immense, and he is
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partly responsible for the widespread, but fallacious view that language should
be precise and `water-tight'.
In the 18th century, puristic passion reached a great height. A trio of
inuential writers, Daniel Defoe (who wrote Robinson Crusoe), Joseph Addison,
and Jonathan Swift (who wrote Gulliver's Travels) urged that panels of experts
should be appointed to regulate the language. They presumably expected that
they themselves would be selected. Daniel Defoe, for example, wanted to
establish a society whose work would be to `polish and rene the English
Tongue, and advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language'
(Defoe 1697).
The best known of these would-be language puriers was Jonathan Swift. He
claimed that if the language `were once rened to a certain Standard, perhaps
there may be ways found out to x it for ever' (Swift 1712/1957). Swift is
sometimes regarded as a high-minded individual who cared lovingly for English.
In fact, he wanted the language to be xed so his own writings might survive. If
English were xed, he suggested: `then our best Writings might probably be
preserved with Care, and grow into Esteem, and the Authors have a Chance for
Immortality' (Swift 1712/1957).
Lone voices, such as Samuel Johnson in the preface to his dictionary (1755),
pointed out that language inevitably changes. But the overwhelmingly popular
view was that language should be xed. In the nineteenth century, attempts at
linguistic purication continued, though with altered emphasis. Most people
assumed that there was a proper way to behave, and etiquette books
proliferated. Language was included in etiquette strictures:
Lunch. This word . . . may be accounted an inelegant abbreviation of luncheon . . . The
proper phraseology to use is, `Have you lunched?' or, `Have you had your luncheon?'
or, better, `Have you had luncheon?' as we may in most cases presuppose that the
person addressed would hardly take anybody's else [sic] luncheon. (Ayres 1896: 167)

But alongside a concern for etiquette, and `proper behaviour', British empire
building in the 19th century led to a false assumption that the English language
was superior to others. Two views are found, one of progress, the other of decay.
A mistaken `progress' view presumed that English had clambered further up the
ladder of development than had other languages, which remained primitive.
The pedant (Dean) F. W. Farrar promotes this view:
What shall we say . . . of the Yamparico, who speaks a sort of gibberish like the
growling of a dog . . . of the Fuegians . . . `whose language is an inarticulate clucking',
. . . (Farrar 1865, in Harris 1996: 7172)

But an equally
Richard Chenevix
bizarre belief that
former excellence.
assumed that:

false `decay' view was more pernicious. The inuential

Trench, eventually archbishop of Dublin, promoted his
the language of `savage tribes' had slithered down from
Trench regarded language as a `moral barometer' and

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with every impoverishing or debasing of personal or national life goes hand in hand a
corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language. (Trench 1856, in Harris
1996: 4)

Trench promoted three false views, which were widely disseminated: that
language and morals are somehow intertwined; that languages may disintegrate; and that vigilance is needed to prevent linguistic collapse.
Remnants of these views are still found today, possibly inherited from old
school lessons. A proportion of the population still assumes that language is
declining, and that a scapegoat must be found. Throughout the 20th century
various `language wreckers' have been nominated, such as the media, teachers,
or even modern life, for example:
. . . the increasingly rapid spread of what I can only describe as Engloid throughout the
all-pervasive communications media foreshadows an anarchy that must eventually
defeat the whole object of communication to understand and be understood . . .
(Tom Baistow The Guardian 13 December 1982)
Taking the easy way out is now the norm. We shall by the year 2150 or thereabouts,
have come full circle. Clawing our way painfully and slowly from Neanderthal
grunting . . . we shall descend swiftly to Neanderthal grunting again. What a
waste! Yours frustratedly . . .
(personal letter, received 1996)

Linguists have tended perhaps tactlessly and unsympathetically, to poohpooh popular worries. Yet the power of long-standing traditions should not be
ignored. They are stronger in the arena of language than in PUS (Public
Understanding of Science) not only because science has more obviously
changed in recent times, but also because (as Johnson notes) everybody who
speaks believes they can comment on language. But as outlined above, the
public has been imbued with false views about the need for `purity' and `xity' of
language which have been handed down for generations.
2. ATTITUDES OF LINGUISTS TO PUBLIC VIEWS ON LANGUAGE
Up until relatively recently, linguists (those professionally concerned with
linguistics) were not interested in public views on language though this is
now changing. This may be because the `decit view' is common to all experts
on any topic, the assumption that those outside a eld must be ignorant. Yet in
linguistics, the `decit view' is particularly widespread, perhaps because it was
explicitly promoted by the so-called `fathers' of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de
Saussure, and Leonard Bloomeld.
Saussure, speaking of language, commented: `No other subject has spawned
more absurd ideas, more prejudices, more illusions or more myths' (Saussure
1915: 22, my translation). He took it for granted that those outside linguistics
will be blinkered in their approach.
Bloomeld, some 30 years later, poured scorn on ignorant, but self-opinionated
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`authorities' on language, whose opinions he labels `secondary' responses to

language:
The speaker who discourses about language sometimes adds that he himself has not a
perfect command of his native language . . . In fact, it soon appears that the speaker
possesses a fairly extensive stock of authoritative knowledge which enables him to
condemn many forms that are used by other speakers. . . . If he knows that he is
talking to a professional student of language, he rst alleges ignorance . . . but then
advances the traditional lore in a fully authoritative tone. (Bloomeld 1944: 48)

The paper from which this passage was taken was required reading during
my rst term of linguistic graduate work (at Harvard, U.S.A., 1960). The
message to be drawn from it, we were told, was that all uninformed views on
language were likely to be false (including our own), and we therefore needed to
start with a `clean slate', from which we could dissect language(s) in a
`scientic' and objective fashion. Presumably many other university students,
the future teachers of linguistics, were indoctrinated in a similar way.
In short, just as the public have been `brainwashed' by inherited attitudes to
language, which may have been taught at school, or read in letters to
newspapers, so linguists have been brainwashed by their linguistic upbringing
to disregard popular views and believe what they themselves have been taught:
brain-washing works in more than one direction!
3. LINGUISTS' OWN VIEWS ON LANGUAGE
The `clean slate' approach advocated to their students by many past linguists
brought with it a large amount of cultural baggage, primarily because the
`objective' language models linguists were urged to adopt in their analyses were
themselves weighed down with unrecognized preconceptions.
Linguists have been lured on to draw conclusions that are unmerited, or,
alternatively, have failed to recognize important facets of language largely
because of the narrow mindset caused by the metaphors about language which
recur in linguistic writings. `In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept . . .
a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the
concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor', Lako and Johnson note
(1980: 10).
In descriptions of language, a number of recurring metaphors are found,
which have biased our views of language. The best known are perhaps the
`family tree', `game' and `building block' metaphors.
The idea of a family tree was popularised by August Schleicher in the midnineteenth century with his so-called Stammbaumtheorie. This has long dominated historical linguistic thought. It represents a group of related languages as
a `family tree' with a primary `mother' language, which then split, in a series of
neat divides, into a set of ospring `daughter languages', which in turn split into
further ospring, as in a genealogical tree though Schleicher's tree was
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initially represented sideways, as an extending and splitting horizontal branch

(Schleicher 186162; Bynon 1986).
The idea of a tree also gave rise to the standard way of diagramming relations
within sentences, an S-node at the top of a page splits into (most commonly) a
noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP), each of which further subdivides, in a
widening upside-down tree which eventually covers the page. Over the years,
the labels for the nodes have changed, as well as the number of nodes, not the
basic neatly-splitting hierarchical structure.
The game metaphor/model originated with Ferdinand de Saussure, when he
likened language to a game of chess. He used this image to point out some
seminal linguistic ideas, above all the insight that the substance out of which
the chess pieces were carved must be distinguished from their `form', the
internal relationship between the pieces. The notion of language as a game of
chess implies that it is essentially a coherent, rule-governed system.
A third major language metaphor is that of building blocks. Structural
linguists, who were prominent above all in the 1940s and 1950s, tended to
describe language as a building, in which small units locked together to form
larger ones (my boldings):
a. Using the phoneme and the morpheme as their basic units, linguists have been
able to build a comprehensive theory of the expression side of language (Gleason
1961: 11).
b. Language . . . is a complex of structures of various kinds. The analysis of a
language must proceed by separating out the various parts, but a full understanding of language cannot be gotten if they are left as detached details unrelated
to one another. The various elements are of signicance and interest primarily
because they t together into one integrated system (Gleason 1961: 373).

These three metaphors, as well as Locke's conduit metaphor, have all

contributed strongly to the idea that language is best described by static
metaphors.
As with any complex system, dierent metaphors could have been adopted.
Johannes Schmidt's Wellentheorie `wave theory' was enthusiastically endorsed
by Saussure. This envisaged language changes as spreading out, like ripples on
a pond (Schmidt 1872). Saussure comments: `A work of Johannes Schmidt
opened the eyes of linguists in inaugurating the theory of . . . waves . . . Thus
wave theory enlightens us on the primordial laws of all phenomena of
dierentiation' (my translation) (Saussure 1915: 287). This image did not
`catch on' until recently. Those few linguists who worked to promote it were not
pre-eminent (e.g. Bailey 1982). Throughout the 20th century, a few lone
voices, such as Malinowski, Firth, Whorf tried to counteract the neat and tidy
structuralist viewpoint, but their unsystematic attempts at `loosening up'
language were only marginally successful. In short, `still life' metaphors have
been more readily adopted than the more realistic `wave' model.
Yet the success of static metaphors is not accidental. The conduit image and
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others would not have been inuential, had they not tied in with existing
cultural viewpoints. Metaphors which thrive in a culture need to t with each
other. They also have to be in accord with the general Zeitgeist. In short, they
have to avoid cognitive dissonance or `frame conict', and also achieve `cultural
resonance' (Aitchison 1997). `If a concept is structured metaphorically, the
presence of multiple conicting metaphors is a serious problem' notes Murphy
(1996: 187). But in most instances, as in language, minor metaphors are
simply ignored: they may be acknowledged, but they do not disrupt the major
viewpoint, as with the marginalisation of the wave metaphor. Metaphors are
not for the most part coined in isolation. The static viewpoint has subconsciously been built into the national consciousness. As Papin (1992: 1258)
comments:
Western languages, based on segmentation verbs and nouns, subjects and objects
are best suited to describing systems at rest and are profoundly decient in accounting
for dissipative structures systems in movement, in turbulence, or under stress.
(Papin 1992: 1258)

Linguists were not consciously distorting their eld, but were subconsciously
tting their ideas in with long-held `western' views about the world:
`Nature on the rack', passively open to human investigation and detached observation, is indeed a construct deeply embedded in our thought and language systems.
(Papin 1992: 1258)

And consequent failure to explore certain metaphors may have slowed down
not only linguistics, but the development of science (Bohm and Perat 1987):
One of the most developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the
split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So
good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again. (Prigogine and Stengers
1984: xi)

In short, linguists have largely pooh-poohed views of the general public on

language. They have particularly disliked those who deplore change, and who
want language to be xed. Yet they themselves have unwittingly fallen into
similar traps, largely through adopting particular metaphors, metaphors which
tted in with the general `western view' of the world, but which falsied
language in much the same way as those people they have criticized. Roger
Lass summarised the situation well:
As practitioners of any eld we are so immersed in our own metalanguage that we
may not notice (a) that much more is metaphorical than we think, and (b) how
important these metaphors are as devices for framing our thinking, and how much of
our theory they actually generate. (Lass 1997: 4142)

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4. CONCLUSION
To return to Johnson, and to recap. She argued that we can usefully look at
debates on the public understanding of science (PUS) and consider to what
extent they are parallel to those found within (socio)linguistics. I agreed that
debates on linguistics overlap with those on PUS, but pointed out that PUS does
not have such a long and well-established tradition as does thinking about
language, where views are more entrenched and so more dicult to eradicate.
I (briey) explained why in the past linguists have been so averse to
considering the public understanding of their subject, and agreed with Johnson
that this must change (and there are signs that this is happening).
Finally, I accepted her view that reections on language might contribute to
discussions on the relationship between language and society more generally
though I attempted to locate the problem within a broader framework. I looked
at well-known metaphors for language, and pointed out that they had been
subconsciously selected because they continued long-held `western' views of the
world, which typically examine `Nature on the rack', passively laid-out for
detached observation.
Where do we go from here? This is unclear but the greater self-awareness
created by discussions of this type must surely be a step in the right direction.
After that, maybe we just need to keep arming our beliefs. As John Rickford
noted over the Ebonics controversy, in an earlier issue of this journal: `Linguists
. . . seem to have forgotten what advertisers of Colgate toothpaste and other
products never forget: that the message has to be repeated over and over, anew
for each generation and each dierent audience type, preferably in simple, direct
and arresting language which the public can understand and appreciate'
(Rickford 1999: 271).
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Address correspondence to:

Jean Aitchison
University of Oxford
Worcester College
Oxford OX1 2HB
United Kingdom
jean.aitchison@worcester.oxford.ac.uk

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