A Matter of Semantics

The Other Side of Reading Comprehension

I found my way through the briar patch sometime in 1974 to S.I. Hayakawa’s semantic reactor built on an ideological foundation bound in time by Alfred Korzybski as a consequence of Korzybski’s lived experiences at the event level of the 1910s and 1920s in World War I. I was an undergraduate with a declared major in English, a transfer student from a community college.

The world is a horrible place, Korzybski felt, scaling the heights of the abstraction ladder and returning to ground zero in the academy. How is it that human beings can construct scientific meanings of such precision that machines can be made to fly, yet young men meet on battlefields and blow one another to smithereens?

***

Stevenson Hall was a beehive of activity all day and evening during fall and spring semester, a ghost hall during spring, summer, and winter breaks. I passed many magical hours in classrooms and lecture halls on the third and fourth floors where the offices of English professors were also located.

Dr. Sutherland’ s office was tucked away at the end of a long hallway, an oddly shaped office of reclaimed space larger than those along the walls. One of a small number of linguistics professors on the faculty, Dr. Sutherland’ s office floor, desk, and bookshelves were jumbles of books and journals as disheveled as his long red hair.

I was taking his course titled “General Semantics,” one of a trio of undergraduate courses in the English Department curriculum in linguistics. The following few semesters I would take the remaining two: Traditional and Non-Traditional Grammar (Chomsky was the “non”) and Growth and Structure of the English Language.

Professor Sutherland used a textbook written by S.I. Hayakawa that featured a single-page mega diagram depicting a human being as a semantic reactor, an atomic core surrounded by arcs of energy, a time-binding agent with a future continuously abstracting their way through the world, reacting to self-made meanings on a self-made map, making maps that are never the territory, routinely taking up the map as the territory, inhabiting a world where science and war co-existed.

***

One class period early in the course, Dr. Sutherland asked his students to arrange desks into a circle, and then he instructed us to find a few small objects in our pockets or purses if we could that we wouldn’t mind contributing to what he called a ‘junk heap.’ We would be able to retrieve the objects after the activity; even so, he cautioned us not to contribute any object of value that might be mistakenly taken or otherwise misplaced.

Soon a pile of junk accumulated on the classroom floor at the center of the circle—some pennies, rubber bands, hair clips, paper clips, a staple remover, lipstick, a small spiral notebook, sticks of gum, a toy dinosaur, a cigarette lighter, etc. Selecting a volunteer, Dr. Sutherland stepped outside and had a brief chat with his collaborative student.

Upon their return, in silence the professor rejoined the circle, and the student sat down on the floor in the center of the circle near the junk pile; surveyed the junk heap; and started moving around some of the objects, reshaping the pile, creating piles within the pile. After a few minutes, having tentatively made several separate piles of junk, the student stopped and nodded at Dr. Sutherland.

“How do you feel about what you’ve accomplished?” Professor Sutherland asked.

“I’m ok with it,” the student responded.

“Good.”

***

We sat in silence. Dr. Sutherland looked us over with his piercing eyes and Cheshire cat smile.

“Does anyone have any observations?” Professor asked after what seemed a long moment.

“I’ll bite,” said a guy named Charlie, a tall young man with a flowing mane of brown hair and a thick beard. I knew him from a Creative Writing class; like me, he was a philosophy minor. “It appears that we have one big pile of assorted objects divided into four smaller less assorted piles.”

Professor Sutherland nodded approvingly. “Anyone else?”

Another bite. “I noticed that she was thinking carefully about what she was doing.”

“How do you know?” Professor asked.

“She picked up the lipstick and started to put it with the cigarette lighter but changed her mind. I thought I understood her until she put the lipstick with the stick of gum.”

“Changed her mind? You saw her change her mind?”

“More or less.”

The discussion picked up steam until Professor explained himself. The student had been instructed to consider the junk as a collection of individual objects that she could categorize according to her own criteria.

Her task was to invent criteria, apply them, and sort the objects accordingly. Next the onlookers would be tasked with speculating what her criteria might be. It became clear that the smaller groupings could be grouped as the student intended, once she revealed them, but other criteria she had not considered could also apply.

Things made mostly of plastic could also be things that you put in or on your mouth, things that fasten or hold things together could also be things that stretch or bend, things that are small could also be things that are large. Nothing fit perfectly, but everything could fit somewhere, if imperfectly.

Professor Sutherland spoke to us about the premise of the sub field called general semantics.

“We are semantic reactors. We react to what we think of as meaning. We don’t react to what has no meaning in our thinking. We live at the event level in a reality of random moments we can never completely know, yet we are cursed or blessed with the drive to find meaning to serve us in these moments. Because we have language, we can bind time, we can store meaning for the future, we can share. What we’ve accomplished here is nothing short of a miracle, something no other creature on earth can do. Can you imagine a room full of dogs or cats doing what you just did? She abstracted meaning from her perceptions of these random objects, imposed structure on them, and we collectively affirmed these abstractions as reality even in the face of absurdity. As time-binding semantic reactors, we must have meaning.”

***

Professor reached into his pocket and pulled out a small square of fabric. He passed it around the circle in silence and asked us to jot down its color. It was amusing to hear the variety of words my peers used to communicate their perceptions. Chocolate, brown, olive, gray, reddish—the proverbial spectrum of colors that we share in broad strokes but are unable to square precisely. After we discussed the problem of labeling perception as risky business, Dr. Sutherland jolted us.

“Chocolate? What if you were interested in a rug for your dorm room or apartments—would you buy one this color if it were a ‘shit brown?’”

Professor talked about an existential circuit from the event level, the state of reality forever unknowable in its fullness in the moment, the level that can be meaningful only partly, imperfectly as an abstraction, through the gateway of our biological equipment to our brains where language shapes available meanings, to end up with maps of territories that are always imperfect yet unavoidably mistaken for actual ground under our feet. We use symbols and signs well enough to fly planes, but we drop bombs on villages and kill one another on battlefields.