Communication Disorders

For many years, the verbal portion of the SAT has featured a question type with the following format:

In line [#], the word […] most nearly means...

In the thirteen-plus years that I've been an after-school tutor, I have come across this question so often that my advice to students has become automatic: "You have to look at the sentence in the passage." What the College Board is testing here is not the student's ability to parrot the common dictionary definitions of words; instead, it is testing the student's ability to understand context.

Meditating upon a task such as this - a task beloved by bubble-test writers - reveals something very important about the way we converse. Words are not completely comprehensible on their own; they also take on additional - or sometimes even new - significance from the gestalt in which they sit -- much like tofu soaks up the flavors of the other ingredients in an Asian dish.

Take a sentence like "I love my mother." This sentence is composed of four utterly prosaic words -- yet do we really know what it means? Don't we need to hear the inflection with which it was said? Don't we need to see the speaker's body language? Don't we need to know why/where/when/etc. it was said? If this sentence appears in a poem lauding the beauty of Mother Earth, "mother" likely does not mean our female parent. If this sentence is uttered with a particular stress after a long sigh, most of us effortlessly intuit that it's meant to be ironic.

What I'm talking about here is pragmatics -- the transcendental, often non-linguistic aspects of our communication. These features seem to be preferentially processed by the right hemisphere of the brain -- at least if the peculiar deficits of patients with right hemisphere injury or hypofunction (for example, loss of the ability to understand sarcasm, idiom, and metaphor) are anything to go by. Their comprehension is also essential to our social functioning and the development of our common sense.

They are also the very features that the radical left seems bent on forcing us not to recognize.

Thus, we have Rep. Ilhan Omar (and her apologists) defending her speech at a CAIR event by comparing it to President W. Bush's extemporaneous speech at Ground Zero immediately after 9/11 -- as if a superficial similarity in word choice means anything at all. No: Bush's "people who knocked these buildings down" was uttered in the context of remarks that took the attack very seriously indeed -- remarks that honored the anger and grief of the devastated New Yorkers picking through the rubble. Omar's "people did something," on the other hand, was part of a speech that focused on the grievances of her own identity group -- a speech dripping with the bitter self-righteousness that is typical of activists of her stripe. To be sure, I certainly don't think all Muslims should be held responsible for terrorist attacks like the one perpetrated on 9/11, nor do I think they should be denied the right to practice their religion as they see fit (with, of course, a few important exceptions). But when you insist that the story of the post-9/11 world is all about your people and their pain, then yes -- I think you deserve criticism. Respect should be a two-way street. If radical Catholic terrorists were killing thousands across the world, I wouldn't urge my fellow Catholics to "raise hell" and "make people uncomfortable." I would feel convicted, I would be humble, and I would do whatever I could to make amends.

Moving on to another manifestation of the left's induced communication disorder: the okay hand sign hysteria. As everyone knows, it was originally trolls on 4chan who invented and spread the meme that the okay hand sign really stood for "white power." But according to Blizzard (and others), now that idiot white supremacists are using the symbol to signal their group identification, suddenly the gesture is permanently tainted and should be forever banned. So quick question: If white supremacists decide to start signaling each other with the code-phrase "I like cupcakes," does that mean we have to radically change how we announce our dessert preferences? No, that's ridiculous!

Over at The Post Millennial, Roberto Wakerell-Cruz has it exactly right (his column is in fact one of the inspirations for this post):

In one sense, of course words matter. Words are incredibly important, and a tool that we as humans are incredibly fortunate to have. To convey a message to one another in such detail is a unique trait. But what are words without context?

Which sentence is worse? “I think it’s retarded that fags can’t get married,” or “with all things considered, and it is indeed my own personal opinion, I believe that those who engage in homosexual acts and wish to marry their lover should be forbidden to do so!”

Although the first sentence contains naughty words, the second sentence actually contains far less progressive ideas. In my opinion, the first person is actually forward thinking, whereas the second is stuck in their old ways.

Context is incredibly important. Sentences are like icebergs. There is what appears on the surface, the letters you see printed on paper. But underneath the words, there’s more than what appears. Sentences can be extrapolated to no end, and interpreted in countless ways.

Focusing your attention purely on which words are being used is just wrong, and unproductive.

Amen, good sir! Condemning any word or sign in isolation is deeply foolish. We don't have to pretend we're suffering from right hemisphere dysfunction; we're perfectly capable of parsing when the use of a certain word, phrase, or gesture is innocuous and when it is not, and we should go on exercising that faculty to its fullest extent.