You would probably argue that society is complex and that there’s no justification for a reductionist sociological philosophy. “Just look around,” you might say, “there are too many shades of gray, too many alternative lifestyles, too many people to reduce into simple categories, just too many subcultures for any unified perspective.”
Yet, all the while we claim our current complexity, we seem to be stuck on simplification. What do I mean? Follow along.
We awoke today to hear that the Boy Scouts will admit girls into their fold. Okay, I don’t have a problem, except in the name. “Scouts,” will do for me, rather than “Boy” or “Girl” scouts. I suppose this will be the talk for some time, how, for example, one group is culling youth from the other group and how one will gain at the expense of the other. And what will we call those cookies? Solving one perceived problem often engenders another, in this instance, a problem with language. Suddenly have a desire for simpler times, when boys might not be selling girl scout cookies and girls might not be camping out with scout masters? Okay with any or all of the potential effects?
In 1914 one of the numerous books on scouting by Scout Master Robert Shaler begins with a conversation among boy scouts and their leader during time hiking in the woods:
“Wasn’t that the far-away hoot of an owl just then, Mr. Scout Master?”
“I wonder if it could be one of those tenderfoot recruits that expect to make up the new Owl patrol of our troop? How about that, Hugh?”
“I’m sure that was the distant growl of thunder we heard,” came the answer from Hugh Hardin, an athletic fellow who had long been the leader of the Wolf patrol.”*
Ah! The assumed simplicity of those days before World War I, when distinctions were distinctions, and little seemed indistinct. Look at us a century and a few years later. Can you understand how traditionalists might be confused by an organization named for one gender that includes another? Obviously, the Boy Scouts originated under cultural circumstances that differed from our own. Obviously, also, the Girl Scouts originated under a similar set of distinguishable cultural circumstances. What, we might ask, will be the proper way to address a girl who is a boy scout? And how will we address the future master (mistress?) scout? Not that it’s an important matter for the culture at large, but certainly it will be for the micro-culture of scouting. And yet, for all of us, this new evolutionary step in boy scout history might help us identify a dilemma in language and culture.
Anyway, in Shaler’s book, the boys debate the alternatives of building a lean-to for protection, finding some sheltered area, and hiding beneath a large tree. I’m not sure how this will work under the present circumstances, but no doubt those wiser than I will work out the details of boys and girls camping out during a storm or having to pee in the woods. Shaler’s chief lesson in the scene, however, seems to be giving advice against taking shelter beneath a tree because of lightning.
But here’s where anyone unfamiliar with vocabulary would caution against so free a mixing of the sexes in the wilderness. Shaler has one of the boys under Mr. Scout Master’s care add this to the conversation when he sees the large oak tree with a cave-like hollow big enough for the small group.
“’Whoop! I’ve guessed a way out of trouble!’ ejaculated Arthur….”
Sorry, parents of little girls are going to balk when someone like Scout Master Robert Shaler so freely uses a word like ejaculated in a time when the word’s use to characterize the nature of an expression has been usurped by its use with another meaning. Shaler wrote an entire series of books for boy scouts. Will his early twentieth-century language put his books on the proscribed list? I can imagine the misinterpretation: “Well, I don’t want my little girl reading about a boy “ejaculating” in the woods.”
Human life has always been complex, of course, but those bygone times were, as many imagine, ostensibly simpler. Distinctions were distinctions, at least on the surface of everyday cultural propriety. Shaler’s Mr. Scout Master also says to his charges, “If you fellows will take the trouble to look up through the treetops [sic.] you’ll notice that there’s a lot of queer flying clouds racing overhead right now.”
As always, connotations abound. Vocabulary changes. What was simple has become complex in some ways and oversimplified in other ways. Meanings have never been stable, but they have definitely become charged with emotional simplicity. No doubt, language reflects culture. But is it a matter of the chicken or the egg? Some would argue that language forms culture. Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, argues that language shapes the way we see the world.* There are linguists who make the counterargument that the world looks the same in different languages. But, what about how the world looks in the same language at different times? Isn’t it in this last question that traditionalists find grievances against changes in both how we view the world and how we speak about it?
I might argue that the language of Scout Master Shaler’s time was English, but a different English. Those reading Shaler’s book understood a slightly different world from the one we currently “understand.” Of course, there are many who are so familiar with multiple meanings of specific words and both their etymology and philology that their only objection to contemporary usage lies in the restrictions and simplifications that contemporary society imposes ironically in the name of complexity and diversity.
Have we, like the Boy Scouts, solved a problem of understanding or created a new one? Have we generated a new perspective that requires a series of redefinitions? Have we now exposed ourselves under the name of freedom to a new variety of restrictions on language and thought? Have we, in the name of erasing distinctions, just added new ones?
*Shaler, Robert, Scout Master. The Boy Scouts and the Prize Pennant, New York, Hurst & Company, Publishers, 1914, p. 6.
**Deutscher, Guy. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2010.
Yet, all the while we claim our current complexity, we seem to be stuck on simplification. What do I mean? Follow along.
We awoke today to hear that the Boy Scouts will admit girls into their fold. Okay, I don’t have a problem, except in the name. “Scouts,” will do for me, rather than “Boy” or “Girl” scouts. I suppose this will be the talk for some time, how, for example, one group is culling youth from the other group and how one will gain at the expense of the other. And what will we call those cookies? Solving one perceived problem often engenders another, in this instance, a problem with language. Suddenly have a desire for simpler times, when boys might not be selling girl scout cookies and girls might not be camping out with scout masters? Okay with any or all of the potential effects?
In 1914 one of the numerous books on scouting by Scout Master Robert Shaler begins with a conversation among boy scouts and their leader during time hiking in the woods:
“Wasn’t that the far-away hoot of an owl just then, Mr. Scout Master?”
“I wonder if it could be one of those tenderfoot recruits that expect to make up the new Owl patrol of our troop? How about that, Hugh?”
“I’m sure that was the distant growl of thunder we heard,” came the answer from Hugh Hardin, an athletic fellow who had long been the leader of the Wolf patrol.”*
Ah! The assumed simplicity of those days before World War I, when distinctions were distinctions, and little seemed indistinct. Look at us a century and a few years later. Can you understand how traditionalists might be confused by an organization named for one gender that includes another? Obviously, the Boy Scouts originated under cultural circumstances that differed from our own. Obviously, also, the Girl Scouts originated under a similar set of distinguishable cultural circumstances. What, we might ask, will be the proper way to address a girl who is a boy scout? And how will we address the future master (mistress?) scout? Not that it’s an important matter for the culture at large, but certainly it will be for the micro-culture of scouting. And yet, for all of us, this new evolutionary step in boy scout history might help us identify a dilemma in language and culture.
Anyway, in Shaler’s book, the boys debate the alternatives of building a lean-to for protection, finding some sheltered area, and hiding beneath a large tree. I’m not sure how this will work under the present circumstances, but no doubt those wiser than I will work out the details of boys and girls camping out during a storm or having to pee in the woods. Shaler’s chief lesson in the scene, however, seems to be giving advice against taking shelter beneath a tree because of lightning.
But here’s where anyone unfamiliar with vocabulary would caution against so free a mixing of the sexes in the wilderness. Shaler has one of the boys under Mr. Scout Master’s care add this to the conversation when he sees the large oak tree with a cave-like hollow big enough for the small group.
“’Whoop! I’ve guessed a way out of trouble!’ ejaculated Arthur….”
Sorry, parents of little girls are going to balk when someone like Scout Master Robert Shaler so freely uses a word like ejaculated in a time when the word’s use to characterize the nature of an expression has been usurped by its use with another meaning. Shaler wrote an entire series of books for boy scouts. Will his early twentieth-century language put his books on the proscribed list? I can imagine the misinterpretation: “Well, I don’t want my little girl reading about a boy “ejaculating” in the woods.”
Human life has always been complex, of course, but those bygone times were, as many imagine, ostensibly simpler. Distinctions were distinctions, at least on the surface of everyday cultural propriety. Shaler’s Mr. Scout Master also says to his charges, “If you fellows will take the trouble to look up through the treetops [sic.] you’ll notice that there’s a lot of queer flying clouds racing overhead right now.”
As always, connotations abound. Vocabulary changes. What was simple has become complex in some ways and oversimplified in other ways. Meanings have never been stable, but they have definitely become charged with emotional simplicity. No doubt, language reflects culture. But is it a matter of the chicken or the egg? Some would argue that language forms culture. Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, argues that language shapes the way we see the world.* There are linguists who make the counterargument that the world looks the same in different languages. But, what about how the world looks in the same language at different times? Isn’t it in this last question that traditionalists find grievances against changes in both how we view the world and how we speak about it?
I might argue that the language of Scout Master Shaler’s time was English, but a different English. Those reading Shaler’s book understood a slightly different world from the one we currently “understand.” Of course, there are many who are so familiar with multiple meanings of specific words and both their etymology and philology that their only objection to contemporary usage lies in the restrictions and simplifications that contemporary society imposes ironically in the name of complexity and diversity.
Have we, like the Boy Scouts, solved a problem of understanding or created a new one? Have we generated a new perspective that requires a series of redefinitions? Have we now exposed ourselves under the name of freedom to a new variety of restrictions on language and thought? Have we, in the name of erasing distinctions, just added new ones?
*Shaler, Robert, Scout Master. The Boy Scouts and the Prize Pennant, New York, Hurst & Company, Publishers, 1914, p. 6.
**Deutscher, Guy. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2010.
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