Review: The Use and Misuse of Language

The Use and Misuse of Language by S.I. Hayakawa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a sometimes interesting anthology of articles and talked from a journal on General Semantics and the body's meetings. Especially the talks seem to have lost sparkle in the transcription. Maybe a quality issue to be explained by a general semanticist?

Editor Hayakawa has said, "My deepest debt [[book:Language in Action|15792683]] is to the General Semantics ('non-Aristotelian system') of Alfred Korzybski. I have also drawn heavily upon the works of other contributors to semantic thought..." Comments and criticisms on Korzybski are interesting here, but are only a seasoning. "SEMANTIC DIFFICULTIES IN. INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION" by Edmund S. Glenn is very interesting for parsing an actual day in the life of the UN Security Council and the subtleties of meaning transformed after passage through the admittedly highly effective UN translators. Hayakawa himself provides, for me, and probably as a music enthusiast, the most engaging piece, "Popular Songs vs. The Facts of Life". He concluded that "The blues tend to be extensionally oriented, while. Popular songs tend to exhibit grave, even pathological intensional orientations." OK, I am still trying to understand that. What will stick with me is the application of speech pathologist Wendell Johnson IFD cycle: I, unrealistic expectations and ideals, lead to F, frustrations, which discourage us, and may delude us with even less realistic expectations or ideal; the IFD can quickly become viciously circular. Probably the IFD cycle affects almost everyone to some degree and Hayakawa uses this to analyze blues songs from W. C. Handy, Bessie Smith, etc.

View all my reviews