Announcer: This is Encounter, with Morris B. Abrams, professor of philolinguistics at Lehman College in the Bronx and Truman G. Douglas, director of translation services at the United Nations. On tonight’s episode, a new kind of air pollution-- a look at the dangers hidden in modern language.


M. Mr. Douglas, I want to start out by saying that what we’re discussing isn't so much about words per se, but that which takes meaning in the everyday day-to-day.

T. Another example of nuanced alliteration?

M. Yes it is. It’s also part of the conjoint evolution of a new kind of communication, i.e. when talking above the lines of natter, gossip and chit, chat.

T. I feel inclined to say something dismissive, something counter-congened, but saying, “boo” comes off as flippant, or [gestures] obscene.

M. No one is actually so naïve… [gets cut off]

T. [interrupts] On the contrary, people take it with conside. There are frameworks that afford assumptions for self-lacking labels and these kinds of verbal tackles are natural. You hear it in the way we talk to strangers.

M. [with raised index finger] But. But, even with strangers, an undercurrent of verb-predicate modeling interrupts causal deference.

T. Hmm. No. [beat] No, there’s an involute of linguist fertility. It happens without the lyrics of highbrow education, and, AND [similarly] it happens without the lexis of streetwise coinage… without anomalous lingo… or jingo innuendo. It just rolls.

M. I don’t think it’s objective to liken this to a spontaneous phenomenon. This isn’t some ball of vocalized fire, like intellectual dialogue, we don’t live in a desert of hot hills where words just “roll” into the sea, into the “seeing is believing” reality. That’s a FAN-tas.

T. FAN-tas?

M. A FAN-tas. As in Beowulf.

T. I’d like to move away from this debate.

M. Fine.

T. I want to take on some of your repoints that deal with the way comments bore from community fabric or the power of demand, the demand of substrates. Where do you imagine the demand comes from?

M. Well, that’s been the subject of a lot of controversy. Some say it comes from the substrates’ commons. There’s a school that chalks it up to precipitants. I don’t think it’s either. I think the demand is produced by our collective desire for meaning. Consider black screen universe theory-- there’s a demand riddled with desperation that emerges from this, it’s a greater anxietophobia. [beat] In other words, we’re alone in the universe.

T. [musing] Oh, we don’t know that.

M. We don’t know otherwise.

T. We haven’t been con-TEXTED by intelligened life from other worlds.

M. Science fiction throws a bevula of psycho-candy into the collective imagination…

T. but people by and large remain objective.

M. Doesn’t matter. Until there’s alien materialism on earth, we’ll be suffused in a paddington of isolitude, a paddington that’s desperate in tone, and one that will produce and define our demand for syntax.

T. And, our current understands of the universe feeds it?

M. By current understands, meaning people of today who have a comparatively wider picture of their reality than the people of… let’s say 1814, then yes.

T. and therefore the palpable sense of isolitude that was embryonic in 1814 is now vibrant?

M. It is.

T. Well, if it’s so vibrant, why hasn’t there been widespread tribute?

M. We tune it out.

T. We tune it out?

M. We have to, we’d die if we didn’t, but it’s there nonetheless.

T. Hmm, and, you believe the ever-widening bed of new additions to purgation, and conjugant terms are driven by this ?

M. It’s the queen of all elephants.