A language for authentic living

Abstract

Since what are offered here are musings on certain fascinating as pects of language which have unfolded by free association, this is a rather 'unstructured' paper. Incidentally, the deviousness hidden in this use of that impressive and highbrow term (why didn't I do some hard work and make it 'structured'?) is already a pointer that language can be used to dissimulate as well as to disclose. But let us hope that not too much of deception and self-deception will be found—on the part of the writer specifically there will be plenty of both—on the handling of language by all of us. The worst that one of the toughest of the many tough aunts of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster could say about him was that he was barely sentient. There is a grudging recognition here that however stupid a man be, he cannot be regarded as mindless, insentient. But the conquest of all the disciplines by the physics of the insentient material particle from the time of Galileo onwards eliminated the psyche of man and the behaviourists celebrated the achievement. J.B. Watson1 wrote:

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