Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!
House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.
Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.'Huh?'Quite so. The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.'The manner in which the other were regarding him/her made Can O' Beans feel compelled to continue. 'The word neat, for example, has precise connotations. Neat means tidy, orderly, well-groomed. It's a valuable tool for describing the appearance of a room, a hairdo, or a manuscript. When it's generically and inappropriately applied, though, as it is in the slang aspect, it only obscures the true nature of the thing or feeling that it's supposed to be representing. It's turned into a sponge word. You can wring meanings out of it by the bucketful--and never know which one is right. When a person says a movie is 'neat,' does he mean that it's funny or tragic or thrilling or romantic, does he mean that the cinematography is beautiful, the acting heartfelt, the script intelligent, the direction deft, or the leading lady has cleavage to die for? Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that's attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it. It hangs between humanity and the real world like a . . . a veil. Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy. I'd hate to ever see that kind of craziness rub off onto objects.
The authors disclose that in less than a century the word "tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, "The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.
Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.