We know from the Vie Amoureuse du Docteur Watson stuff of foreign critics, that true understanding of foreign literature is almost impossible; yet quite ignorant people profess to get, do get, vast pleasure out of poetry in foreign and even dead languages. Clearly the pleasure they derive may come from something the writer never intended, possibly from something that would make him squirm in his grave if he knew it was attributed to him. I say to myself Vixi puellis nuper idoneus, and I repeat this over and over for five minutes for the beauty of the word idoneus. Yet, considering the gulf of time and culture, and my ignorance of Latin, and the fact that no one even knows how Latin was pronounced, is it possible that the effect I am enjoying is the effect Horace was trying for? It is as though I were in ecstasies over the beauty of a picture, and all because of some splashes of paint which had accidentally got on to the canvas two hundred years after it was painted. Notice, I am not saying that art would necessarily improve if words conveyed meaning more reliably. For all I know art thrives on the crudeness and vagueness of language. I am only criticizing words in their supposed function as vehicles of thought. And it seems to me that from the point of view of exactitude and expressiveness our language has remained in the Stone Age.
The solution I suggest is to invent new words as deliberately as we would invent new parts for a motor-car engine. Suppose that a vocabulary existed which would accurately express the life of the mind, or a great part of it. Suppose that there need be no stultifying feeling that life is inexpressible, no jiggery-pokery with artistic tricks; expressing one’s meaning simply (being) a matter of taking the right words and putting them in place, like working out an equation in algebra. I think the advantages of this would be obvious. It is less obvious, though, than to sit down and deliberately coin words in a common-sense proceeding. Before indicating a way in which satisfactory words might be coined, I had better deal with the objections which are bound to arise.
If you say to any thinking person ‘Let us form a society for the invention of new and subtler words’, he will first of all object that it is the idea of a crank, and then probably say that our present words, properly handled, will meet all difficulties. (This last, of course, is only a theoretical objection. In practice everyone recognizes the inadequacy of language — consider such expressions as ‘Words fail’, ‘It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it’, etc.) but finally he will give you an answer something like this: ‘Things cannot be done in that pedantic way. Languages can only grow slowly, like flowers; you can’t patch them up like pieces of machinery. Any made-up language must be characterless and lifeless — look at Esperanto, etc. The whole meaning of a word is in its slowly-acquired associations’, etc.
In the first place, this argument, like most of the arguments produced when one suggests changing anything, is a long-winded away of saying that what is must be. Hitherto we have never set ourselves to the deliberate creation of words, and all living languages have grown slowly and haphazard; therefore language cannot grow otherwise. At present, when we want to say anything above the level of a geometrical definition, we are obliged to do conjuring trick with sounds, associations, etc.; therefore this necessity is inherent in the nature of words. The non sequitur is obvious. And notice that when I suggest abstract words I am only suggesting an extension of our present practice. For we do now coin concrete words. Airplanes and bicycles are invented, and we invent names for them, which is the natural thing to do. It is only a step to coining names for the now unnamed things that exist in the mind. You say to me ‘Why do you dislike Mr Smith?’ and I say ‘Because he is a liar, coward, etc.’, and I am almost certainly giving the wrong reason.
In my own mind the answer runs ‘Because he is a — kind of man’, — standing for something which I understand, and you would understand if I could tell it you. Why not find a name for ——? The only difficulty is to agree about what we are naming. But long before this difficulty raised, the reading, thinking type of man will have recoiled from such as ideas as the invention of words. He will produce argument like the one I indicated above, or others of a more or less sneering, question-begging kind. In reality all these arguments are humbug. The recoil comes from a deep unreasoned instinct, superstitious in origin. It is the feeling that any direct rational approach to one’s difficulties, any attempt to solve the problems of life as one would solve an equation, can lead nowhere — more, is definitely unsafe. One can see this idea expressed everywhere in a roundabout way. All the bosh that is talked about our national genius for ‘muddling through’, and all the squashy godless mysticism that is urged against any hardness and soundness of intellect, mean au fond that it is safer not to think. This feeling starts, I am certain, in the common belief of children that the air is full of avenging demons waiting to punish presumption(2).
In adults the belief survives as a fear of too rational thinking. I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, pride comes before a fall, etc. — and the most dangerous pride is the false pride of the intellect. David was punished because he numbered the people — i.e. because he used his intellect scientifically. Thus such an idea as, for instance, ectogenesis, apart from its possible effects upon the health of the race, family life, etc., is felt to be in itself blasphemous. Similarly any attack on such a fundamental thing as language, an attack as it were on the very structure of our own minds, is blasphemy and therefore dangerous. To reform language is practically an interference with the work of God — though I don’t say that anyone would put it quite in these words. This objection is important, because it would prevent most people from even considering such an idea as the reform of language. And of course the idea is useless unless undertaken by large numbers. For one man, or a clique, to try and make up a language, as I believe James Joyce is now doing, is as absurd as one man trying to play football alone. What is wanted is several thousands of gifted but normal people who would give themselves to word-invention as seriously as people now give themselves to Shakespearean research. Given these, I believe we could work wonders with language.
Now as to the means. One sees an instance of the successful invention of words, though crude and on small scale, among the members of large families. All large families have two or three words peculiar to themselves — words which they have made up and which convey subtilized, non-dictionary meanings. They say ‘Mr Smith is a — kind of man’. Using some home-made word, and the others understand perfectly; here then, within the limits of the family, exists an adjective filling one of the many gaps left by the dictionary. What makes it possible for the family to invent these words is the basis of their common experience. Without common experience, of course, no word can mean anything. If you say to me ‘What does bergamot smell like?’ I say ‘Something like verbena’. And so long as you know the smell of verbena you are somewhere near understanding me.
The method of inventing words, therefore, is the method of analogy based on unmistakable common knowledge; one must have standards that can be referred to without any chance of misunderstanding, as one can refer to a physical thing like the smell of verbena. In effect it must come down to giving words a physical (probably visible) existence. Merely talking about definitions is futile; one can see this whenever it is attempted to define one of the words used by literary critics (e. g. ‘sentimental’(3) ‘vulgar’, ‘morbid’, etc.). All meaningless — or rather, having a different meaning for everyone who uses them. What is needed is to show a meaning in some unmistakable form, and then, when various people have identified it in their own minds and recognized it as worth naming, to give it a name. The question is simply of finding a way in which one can give thought an objective existence.
The thing that suggests itself immediately is the cinematograph. Everyone must have noticed the extraordinary powers that are latent in the film — the powers of distortion, of fantasy, in general of escaping the restrictions of the physical world. I suppose it is only from commercial necessity that the film has been used chiefly for silly imitations of stage plays, instead of concentrating as it ought on things that are beyond the stage. Properly used, the film is the one possible medium for conveying mental processes. A dream, for instance, as I said above, is totally indescribable in words, but it can
