In one of his earliest essays, Walker Percy expounded a theory of “Metaphor as Mistake,” and it is true that many insights, not all of them metaphorical, can arise from misunderstanding or, as happens to me more frequently these days, mishearing what someone has said.  A psychiatrist friend, back about 1970, told me of a new treatment he had read about for certain kinds of neurotics.  The idea seemed brilliant: Treat the neurotics, all too often self-indulgent manipulators, by responding to the actual words they use, rather than to the intentions they are indirectly trying to convey.

Imagine, the next time your whining girlfriend, disappointed that you are not going to the most expensive place in town, says, “After all, maybe we really shouldn’t go out tonight.”

“Great.  Go rustle up some grub, woman.”

Or think how much fun it would be to respond directly to all the buried and half-dead metaphors in everyday American English, such as “You need to leap on the opportunity,” or “Over my dead body,” or “Give me a break.”

More serious means may need to be applied to politicians who use words they do not understand.  When Bill Clinton was pondering the meaning of is, he spoke of “parsing his sentences,” as if parse meant something like “refine upon the meaning” or “use words with subtlety,” when it means nothing more than to analyze the grammatical function of each word.

The malapropisms of President Bush have received wide attention from unfriendly critics in the leftist media, who hold him to a higher standard than they would ever apply to his rivals.  Some of the President’s more celebrated gaffes could have been uttered by anyone having a bad day, just as Jerry Ford’s bumblings were nothing but the occasional misstep taken by the most athletic president of the 20th century.  Some of George W. Bush’s other utterances are merely the sign of the poor education that most people receive in fashionable universities, while still others, by far the most interesting, are an indication of a political mind taking refuge in equivocal clichés.

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.”

“Part of the facts is understanding we have a problem, and part of the facts is what you’re going to do about it.”

“Those who enter the country illegally violate the law.”

These gaffes would be funny if George Bush were anyone but the Commander in Chief, and if the style were not so clearly the reflection of the man.  Taken together, these Bushisms reveal a man who (in the first example) uses poetical language as a substitute for rational discourse and (in the second) cannot distinguish between a fact and an attitude or intention, or (in the third) between the law and his own opinion.  What does he think he means when he declares that illegal immigration is against the law?  Obviously, he means that illegal border crossings, so long as they are useful to someone, are not really against the law.

The President is hardly alone in his penchant for revealing malapropisms.  Al Gore was similarly gifted, and most media pundits who despise the President are even more duplicitous in their abuse of the language.  Dan Rather is legendary for his bewildering folksy metaphors, as in “When the going gets weird, anchormen punt.”  Thomas Friedman, the New York Times point man for disinformation, has gone beyond Rather, with such dreary nonsense as “And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless.”  Matt Taibbi (in the New York Press, December 14-20, 2005) is only the most trenchant of many reviewers who deride Friedman’s “confused metaphorical/rhetorical constructions” that constitute “a veritable mountain range of idiocy.”  There is even a Tom Friedman mixed-metaphor contest somewhere on the internet.

But Friedman’s vapidity and bad prose, so typical of the New York Times, are matched by veteran conservative commentators.  In a column significantly entitled “It Can’t Be Said in Simple Words,” William F. Buckley, Jr., after characterizing the White House response to criticism as “silence,” goes on to say, “The reaction to this Silence came to a boil . . . ”  The same column includes an illiterate Clintonism (“press chief McClellan attempted to preempt a parsing . . . ”) as well as this masterpiece of obfuscation: “What the administration appears to be resisting is endorsement of legislation that suffers from inbuilt rigidities that preclude the realities.”  What Mr. Buckley apparently meant to say is that the administration opposed any legislation that would tie the hands of the CIA in interrogating terrorists.  By “inbuilt rigidities,” he means the rule of law, and by “preclude the realities,” he must be referring to a certain flexibility granted the CIA, which has the right to violate the laws of all nations and moral codes.  Since no one can even conceivably preclude (that is, shut the door against) any reality, Mr. Buckley’s reality is of a piece with Mr. Bush’s facts: Both are subjective mental states that can only be analyzed by speech therapists and abnormal psychologists.

The bizarre speech of pundits and politicians reveals more than ignorance: Sloppy imagery, mixed metaphors, and confused syntax are indications of a mental disturbance that is somewhere between imbecility and dishonesty.  However, the most acute form of the disease is to be observed not in presidential speeches or editorial columns but in academic books and journals, where Germanic noun clusters replace English syntax and the use of pseudotechnical jargon obscures the plain fact that some poor devil of an English professor has never been taught standard English.  But, then, where would he learn it?  Certainly not in an English class.

Now imagine a series of therapy sessions in which the patient had to experience literally and vividly all the malapropisms and mixed and inappropriate metaphors on which he relies in his neurotic campaign to evade reality.  Imagine Friedman and Rather and Buckley and Harold Bloom enduring the Logo-katharsis treatment (my name).  One part of it might be an unpleasant electric shock, to be applied in response to every mixed metaphor or duplicitous circumlocution.  Food and water might be withheld from the patient until he learned to ask for them in polite, standard English.  This procedure would be justified, according to modern medical ethics, on the grounds that most politicians, journalists, and professors, from their utterances, appear to be brain-dead.

Inspired by my own fantasy, I asked for the article, only to discover that I had misunderstood the psychiatrist’s description of a perfectly banal approach to therapy, as likely to heal the mind as voodoo or Freudian analysis.  I should have known.

My fantasy was based on a very ancient concept, that words have meanings, which, though they might not qualify as perfectly “objective,” are related, nonetheless, to reality, which I define as “that which exists apart from my opinion.”  Confucius, when asked for advice on proper administration of government, replied that “what is necessary is to call things by their right names.”  Derided by a professional politician, Confucius explained, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.  If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”  Applying correct names is one of the highest human functions, and, although occultists may have made too much of it, naming the creatures is Adam’s first action.

Using words properly, on a low level, is a manifestation of sincerity, but correct diction is also among the most serious tasks for the philosopher.  Socrates and Plato tugged their disciples and antagonists through a cathartic process of discovering the true meaning of such words as piety and courage, and most of us today who take any interest in truth cut our teeth on the Euthyphro and Laches.  Respect for the meaning of words is one of the things learned in studying classics, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out in his memoir, A Little Learning.  Waugh’s early education consisted almost exclusively of Greek, Latin, history, and mathematics.  Little, alas, had stuck:

Today I remember no Greek.  I have never read Latin for pleasure and should be now hard put to it to compose a simple epitaph.  But I do not regret my superficial classical studies.  I believe that the conventional defense of them is valid; that only by them can a boy understand that a sentence is a logical construction and that words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.  Those who have not been so taught—most Americans and most women—unless they are guided by some rare genius, betray their deprivation.  The old-fashioned test of an English sentence—will it translate?—still stands after we have lost the trick of translation.

This, then, should be a primary goal of any serious education: to teach the students sufficient Latin and Greek for them to be able to test their English sentences and the thoughts behind them by translating them into Latin.  A libertarian friend has told me many times that moral life comes down to freedom of choice, but how can a man be free to choose if he is not clear-headed enough to know what he is choosing?  A dose of the classics might help.  Not all classicists are honest men, but undisciplined minds (especially in this age of lies and mass media) hardly know the difference between truth and fiction, reality and theory.  Walton Morris, who taught me Greek at the College of Charleston, used to recite a series of “Morris’s Maxims,” which were addressed to students who whined, as they floundered over a passage of Demosthenes or Livy, “I know what it means, I just can’t put it into words.”  I can still recall the first three maxims:

If you know it, you can say it.

If you can’t say it, you don’t know it.

If you can say it but cannot con-
strue it (explain the grammar
and syntax), you cheated.

Number three would have pleased Plato, who insisted that correct opinion was of limited value to a man who could not give a rational account of why it is correct.

Morris’s Maxims assume a relationship between word and reality that would be doubted by some mystic visionaries and most postmodern philosophers, but when a mystic wishes to communicate his ineffable vision or a postmodern, the foolish conundrums he wishes to palm off as original profundity, he must fall back on words.  Early on, the Greeks began using logos (speech, reason, ratio) to mean the organizing principle of the universe.  When Saint John came to write the Fourth Gospel, he picked up the idea of the logos as naturally as Jefferson picked up the language of natural rights, but Saint John, in adopting the conventional language of Neoplatonists and Stoics, brought it to fulfillment, realizing that Christ Himself was the Light that irradiated the uncomprehending darkness.

For most of us, the search for truth consists in the attempt to make language and reality converge.  Loss of precision in diction and grammar (as in the disappearing distinction between shall and will, should and would) entails a corresponding loss in our ability to discover and express what is true.  In this respect, Noam Chomsky, whatever truth he might have uttered in his outspoken political tirades or in his convoluted defense of human freedom, worked an unspeakable evil in encouraging English teachers in the delusion that a language is simply the way some people talk at a certain time.  Language, while not a science, is an art, like the rhetoric, logic, and poetry that arise from speech, and the clarity of Greek philosophy, from Parmenides to Aristotle, is inconceivable in any linguistic context but ancient Greek.

To this extent, the British analytical philosophers were on the right track, in analyzing the way people speak about reality.  But even good British English of the early 20th century is a very limiting vehicle for expressing and analyzing propositions.  The vocabulary of the postmodern United States—part Valley Girl, part Madison Avenue—is not sufficient to describe what I did on my summer vacation, much less to grapple with the meaning of is.  Our stock of good words is diminishing each day.  It is as if we were living in Godard’s Alphaville, a computer-controlled society, where hotel rooms are furnished with a “Bible” that is really a dictionary from which seditious words (such as love) are continually being removed.  The hero, not insignificantly, poses as a journalist working for Figaro-Pravda, and, as in our own world, the journalists are propagandists for the regime.

Alphaville, originally entitled Tarzan v. IBM, is often compared with 1984, but neither the Marxist Godard nor the ex-Marxist Orwell could grapple with the fact that the proletarianization of modern languages is one of the principal tools being used to enslave the human mind.  The dialogue of contemporary films and fiction, as much as blue jeans, dope, and hip-hop, degrades us all, not so much by its profanity as by its shoddiness.  “It is easy,” B.L. Gildersleeve once observed, “to sit in the seat of the scornful of nice grammatical distinctions,” but, as he might have added, that seat is a dunce stool.