E-Prime: Getting rid of ‘am’, ‘is’, and ‘are’
Feb 8th, 2010 by Bill
E-Prime: Getting rid of ‘am’, ‘is’, ‘are’
To listen to the audio recoding please click on this link
Reading: James Chapter 3
Some enterprising American company has recently come up with a new punctuation mark. It’s called a sarkmark. It’s a dot in the middle of a single spiral and it’s to be used to draw attention to irony or sarcasm in emails. The theory is that since sarcasm and irony can generally be identified in speech by the tone of voice but are not too readily detected in writing and so a little mark at the end of an ironic or sarcastic passage would help the reader to get the tone right. Here’s an example given by the Michigan company behind the sarkmark. A British woman who won the lottery was only paid half of the sum she had won because her ticket had fallen out of her pocket and was cashed by someone else. She wrote about this, ‘It’s jolly decent of them to let me have a half share of my win.’ Did she really mean that the lottery people were being good to her, or was she being sarcastic? If we heard her say it we would probably know; seeing it written we can’t tell. What it needs is a sarkmark, say the company who are selling downloads of this innovative piece of punctuation at $1.99 a time.
They have a point. A lot of us have trouble with irony, even in speech, and I’m sure that many arguments between married couples have hinged as much on ‘tone of voice’ as on actual verbal content. You know the kind of thing – at least, if you’re married you do. ‘I never said that! What I said was…..’ ‘Yes, but it wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it….’ But, of course, ‘how you said it’ is not recoverable. One can remember the words and recite them, but the tone is not so easy to duplicate and can always be denied. There’s an email doing the rounds at the moment which lists a number of expressions used by women alongside what these expressions really mean. ‘We need to talk’ means ‘You’re in trouble’; ‘Sure, go ahead’ means ‘You’d better not’; ‘Do what you want’ means ‘You’ll pay for this later’; and ‘I’m not upset’ means ‘Of course I’m upset, you moron!’ (There’s also a list of expressions used by men, but since these all seem to mean the same thing we may as well ignore them!) Maybe we also need a way of indicating such sarcasm in speech, something like the irritating ‘inverted commas’ action that was so popular some years ago and which can still occasionally be produced just to annoy us. So, something like ‘Oh, you’ve really excelled yourself this time!’ would be followed by a dot and a squiggle made with the hand, just to let the hearer know that he or she wasn’t being praised.
And it might not be a bad idea to extend our repertoire of punctuation marks to include a mark say, for deliberate exaggeration, another to indicate the presence of a metaphor, one which says ‘don’t take this literally’, and so on. These would be useful in religious circles because wars have been fought, lives lost, families split, reputations ruined all on conflicting interpretations of words. Would that the writers of the Book of Genesis had followed his account of the creation of the world with a little squiggle which indicated that we weren’t meant to take this literally!
But then, maybe not. Half the fun of discourse lies in interpreting for oneself, reading between the lines, distinguishing among the various registers that a speaker will use – sometimes quite unconsciously – in order to get his message across. To have someone point these out for us in pedestrian fashion would completely destroy normal conversation. The important thing is to be alert to these things, to be educated in the art of discourse, something which, sadly, never happens in school and rarely happens in the home. In the 1970s examination boards in Britain brought in ‘oracy’ as part of the GCE English examination, and what should have been an opportunity to educate pupils in the multi-faceted nature of our spoken language became instead coaching in speech making. Few of us need to be shown how to talk; the time would have been better spent teaching children how to shut up, since the mark of a good conversationalist is a willingness to listen carefully and respond appropriately, not an ability to go on at length.
Alertness to the nuances of language, sensitivity to the various ways in which we use words to communicate, both in speech and in writing, is essential in religion, perhaps more essential here than in any other area of human activity. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that the primary purpose of philosophy was to prevent us from being bamboozled by the language we use, to enable us to untangle the knots in which we inadvertently tie ourselves while using apparently innocuous words and customary speech patterns. ‘Good morning,’ you say to an acquaintance at the bus stop. ‘What’s good about it?’ he retorts. But ‘good morning’ is not an observation; it is a wish. You aren’t saying, ‘Isn’t it a good morning?’ you are saying, ‘I hope you have a good morning,’ which is very different and to which your friend’s response is totally inappropriate.
That’s a trivial example. Here’s something more important. Take the words of consecration used by the priest in a Catholic mass. When breaking the bread he says, ‘Take, eat, this is my body,’ echoing the words that the Gospels report Jesus as saying at the Last Supper. The Gospels were written in Greek, and the Greek words are ‘touto estin to soma mou’ which became ‘hoc est enim corpus meum’ in Latin, and both are correctly translated into English as ‘this is my body’. Now, while it is more than likely that Jesus would have known some Greek and some Latin, it is highly unlikely that he would have spoken either at the Last Supper. His native language, and the language he would have used with his friends, was Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew. And in neither Aramaic nor Hebrew would the word ‘is’ have formed part of what Jesus said. In both languages he would have said, ‘This, my body.’ Presumably, then, everything would depend on how he said the words. What if he’d said them as a sports fan might have described a goal he’d witnessed by manoeuvring the salt pot on the dinner table and saying, ‘This is the goalie, right?’ What if Jesus had said when picking up the bread, ‘This is my body, right?’? The listener would know immediately that he meant ‘this represents my body’. But we can’t do that with a written text.
I’m not trying to attack the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist; I am simply trying to show that ambiguity and misinterpretation are always possible where words are concerned and we need to be constantly on the alert to the dangers inherent in what we say and what we write. This is probably why Jesus tells us to make our ‘yes’ mean ‘yes’ and our ‘no’ mean ‘no’, and why the Letter of James in the Christian Scriptures warns us that no one has been able to tame the tongue, and that it is potentially an evil ‘full of deadly poison’. And we need to be particularly alert where the word ‘is’ is concerned, because the word ‘is’ is a very tricky customer. As the philosopher George Santayana put it, ‘The little word “is” has its tragedies.’ It was in order to avoid such tragedies that, forty-five years ago, the author David Bourland proposed a radical overhaul of the English language which he called ‘E-Prime’ (short for English Prime), which would necessitate the elimination of all parts of the verb ‘to be’ – getting rid of ‘am’, ‘is’, and ‘are’, ‘was’, ‘were’, and ‘will be’ from our speech and from our writing. Bourland was a student of Alfred Korzybski who taught that we must always be on our guard because the abstract concepts we rely on to structure our experience don’t always reflect the world in a straightforward way. Free with yesterday’s Guardian was a little booklet on the Japanese language, in which the actress Naoko Mori writes:
The way in which we communicate speaks volumes about who we are. It has always fascinated me how the personality of Japanese culture is echoed in the structure of its language…… Social formalities, etiquette and modesty are instilled in us in our upbringing almost from birth; respect and consideration for others are of the utmost importance. The word most closely associated with this spirit is wa. It means ‘harmony’, ‘gentle’, ‘calm’, ‘moderate’, but also ‘Japanese’. Knowing how to unearth such layers of meaning takes time and training, but once you learn reading between the lines, you will find beauty and poetry beneath the surface of this delicate language.
So, the Japanese language reflects the Japanese character; they influence each other, and we might assume that they do so rather positively if politeness of behaviour is encouraged by the very structure of the language. But, says Korzybski, we must remember, that ‘The map is not the territory’ and that language contains hidden traps which can distort reality, and can cause confusion and distress.
In languages like English, he said, the verb ‘to be’ contains the most traps of all. For example, sentences containing ‘is’ often imply objectivity when all that is being offered is opinion. Take the sentence, ‘The film Avatar is an overlong, overhyped farrago of nonsense’. The ‘is’ here deceives us. It makes the sentence read and sound like a statement of fact, like ‘Today is Sunday’ – a sentence which it resembles in its structure – but it is just an opinion. It really means, ‘The film Avatar seems to me an overlong, overhyped farrago of nonsense,’ and if this is what we mean, shouldn’t this be what we say, or what we write?
Judgements of things may not be terribly problematic, and it is quite likely that most people can separate facts from judgements without difficulty, but what about judgments of people? What about the sentence, ‘My father is tight-fisted’? This seems like an objective statement but it isn’t by any means. It means, ‘My father seems to me tight fisted,’ and it may certainly disguise the fact that my father’s tight-fistedness is really prudence, that he is tight-fisted as far as I am concerned because I am a wastrel.
Even worse, though, are judgements offered to someone’s face – second person judgements. ‘You are an idiot’ can be a jocular retort from one friend to another (if it’s accompanied by a wink, or a nod, or a nudge of the elbow) but what if it is said angrily to a young child, day after day, by a parent or a teacher? There is nothing wrong with telling a child that he or she has behaved stupidly – it should happen more often than it does! – , but to say ‘You are stupid’ implies a state of being, that the child has a fixed, irreversible nature and it is almost inevitable that the child will internalise this, expect it, and maybe even resign him or herself to making it a reality. My friend Paddy Symons once put up some shelves for Morag and me, and I was astonished at his expertise. ‘How come you can do that so well?’ I asked him. ‘Because I never did woodwork at school and so nobody told me I was useless,’ he replied.
The same applies to what we might call ‘first-person’ judgments – the things a person says to himself about himself. ‘I’m no good at maths’; ‘I’m a failure’, and the like. These, says Oliver Burkeman, feel ‘permanent, all-encompassing, hopeless’, and should probably be restated in E-Prime. ‘I’m no good at maths’ becomes ‘So far, I’ve not done maths terribly well’. ‘I’m a failure’ becomes ‘I feel like a failure’ or ‘I failed at this task’. The E Prime sentences are limited statements with no sense of finality about them. They do not imply a state of being, just a temporary set-back; we can take steps to deal with apparent inability or failure when they are expressed in these terms. My own mantra, ‘I’m no good at practical things’, which prompted me to ask Paddy to fix my shelves in the first place, should be re-expressed in E-Prime as ‘Hitherto I’ve not succeeded terribly well in practical things’ which at least contains the possibility that the future does not necessarily have to repeat the past. (Although I’m still of the opinion that the best DIY book is a cheque book!)
It is highly unlikely that E-Prime will ever catch on; the theoretical objections to it from people like Naom Chomsky are formidable, and on a purely practical level we would all be lost without those little words ‘am’, ‘is’, and ‘are’. But it is no bad thing to examine the way we say things, to acknowledge that language can subtly imprison us, and to recognise that we owe it to our well being to take steps to break free every now and then.
February 7th 2010
The idea for this sermon came from an article by Oliver Burkeman in Guardian Weekend (16th January 2010).