Newt Gingrich, Whorfian theorist
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Barbara Scholz died exactly two years ago today. Had she lived, I would have been drawing her attention to Newt Gingrich's latest YouTube video "We're Really Puzzled". Not because she would have liked this latest Gingrichian piece of Republican-oriented self-promotion (she would have hated it), but because he appears to be flirting with what she used to call strong or global or metaphysical Whorfianism, in a naive lexical variant form. (You can read Barbara's discussion of strong and weak Whorfian theses in this section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on philosophy of linguistics.) Holding up a smartphone, Gingrich says:
We're really puzzled here at Gingrich Productions. We've spent weeks trying to figure out: What do you call this? I know, you probably think it's a cell phone . . . But if it's taking pictures, it's not a cell phone."
Now, this may at first sound ridiculous; but in fact I do have an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.
I only recently abandoned my old cell phone (an ancient castoff from my brother, who still likes dumbphones) and acquired my first full-function smartphone. And indeed, phone doesn't seem quite the right root, not even with the smart- prefix. There is no way this thing is a telephone. It is a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone. And that's really very different.
I have often tried here on Language Log, in playful or polemical ways, to critique naive lexical strong Whorfianism, which seems to take up most of the discussion of language that you find among the general public. And Gingrich's point is really grist to my mill.
Naive lexical global Whorfianism comes in two flavors. One, the world-to-word flavor, says that when a nation or tribe becomes enormously interested in some new activity or concept they feel impelled to make a new word to denote it. The other, the word-to-world flavor, says that we can't form a concept if we don't have a word to serve as the name for it. For real enthusiasts of the word-to-world flavor, the world as we perceive it is just a patchwork of concepts created by the network of words that we have.
Either way, it is alleged, you can tell what interests the members of a culture simply by examining the dictionary of their language. Nonlinguists are just entranced by this idea, as you can learn from magazine articles just about every week. Here's an absolutely typical recent example: a page devoted to a map of 19 emotions that English allegedly has no words for.
Let's take the tired old example of Schadenfreude. The idea is either (world to word) that (i) the feeling of experiencing joy at the misfortune of another person is so important for Germans that they made sure they developed a special word to name it, or (word to world) that (ii) German speakers only see Schadenfreude because they have that word, and English speakers in exactly the same contexts don't see it because they don't have the word for it (unless they manage to borrow the word Schadenfreude for it, of course, which seems to drive a coach and horses through the notion we're talking about; but set that aside for now).
Well, we English speakers have never had a word for a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone. The concept was almost unimaginable as recently as about 1990. Yet the developers of these devices formed the concept quite easily, and invented products such as the iPhone.
Moreover, we all latched onto the idea of these devices quite easily without having a word to name them with. We had absolutely no noun that was remotely appropriate as the name for a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone, and yet we have proved capable of learning about them, buying them, and using them everywhere all the time.
To refer to them we simply made use of a word we already had: phone. We used that as a lexical workaround for the magic things. Not that it mattered: we could have called them navigators, or web-searchers, or palm-browsers, or nanocomputers, or (borrowing from Star Trek) tricorders . . .
It doesn't matter that you don't have a word to name a certain concept (which is why Gingrich's appeal to his viewers to think one up is unnecessary). You get by. You cope.
Naive lexical global Whorfianism, in either flavor, is bunk.