I like linguists and linguistics but a recent post at Language Log about the proposed California “Compassionate Choices Act” (AB 374) reminded me why linguists, like anyone else, need a smack with a wet fish every now and then.
Geoff Nunberg says in the offending post that
Intent only on the issue of the wording, Dr. Nunberg assumes that the mere form of the wording is the only issue. But allowing doctors to “end the lives” of terminal patients might easily be construed as allowing doctors to withhold “lifesaving” measures or turn off life support on persons who are actually or effectively dead: far less controversial measures than assisted suicide.
Are linguists terrible people who want to kill our ill and elderly over their weeping protests? No. But, intent on words, they may miss the thing the words are intended to signify.
The relevance for writing fiction? Maybe there’s none. But I think here’s a danger for writers, especially writers who want to write well, to fixate on the word over the thing, the signifier rather than the signified. In a way, this makes sense: stories are made of words, not things (except insofar as words are also things).
It’s sensible, but it’s death. Here, as always, I think of Le Guin. Quoting from memory: The artist says what cannot be said with words. A writer is an artist who uses words. Therefore, a writer is an artist who uses words to say what cannot be said with words. I take this to mean that we write not with words but through words, using words to direct the reader’s inner eye toward things we’ve imagined that it might not otherwise see. If the reader stops at the surface of our words and sees only them, we’ve failed.
I’ve heard it said (can’t recall where) that the words on the page do not form a story. They merely form instructions for the reader to create a story in his/her head.
Not sure how relevant that is, but I’ve always found it interesting.
I like that. Another metaphor I’ve heard, can’t remember who came up with it, is that a writer is like a composer and the reader is both musician and audience.
Interesting. I have a theory that in most kinds of narrative, the words should be transparent to the reader. I don’t share the “writerly” joy in new or obscure words.
I’m inclined to agree. Of course, the same set of words isn’t equally transparent to any two readers. I was startled when a reviewer of my first story referred to its “fancy vocabulary.”
I think the reverse of the Law of Transparency is the law of POV Diction (I’m making these up): Vocabulary and turn of phrase comes from the POV character.
Sounds reasonable. Even obscurity can clearly indicate something (here the bookishness or remoteness of the POV character.
“(I’m making these up)”
We’re fantasists–we have to make stuff up.