Sportive Thoughts

"Ossify" is an intransitive verb meaning "to become bony" or "to solidify"; and "etiolate" is an intransitive verb meaning "to branch away" or "to dissolute."

These two words-- ossify and etiolate-- are occasionally used by philosophers of language to describe the fluctuating use of words over time. A linguistic construction whose usage "ossifies" effectively loses potential applicability to new contexts and meanings; similarly, a linguistic construction whose usage "etiolates" effectively loses precision and be applied so widely to such diverse contexts that it risks becoming useless. It would seem as if the change in the usage of words must be "just right" in order for language as a whole to survive. Otherwise our language could split into extremes and render useless our attempts to communicate.

Here is Friedrich Schleiermacher on the first verb, "ossify."

There also arises a pretension that scientific expression should be 'exact,' but this pretension can never be fulfilled. There are always terms that are commonly called 'figurative,' and even when that does not seem to be so, it is only because the terms are no longer grasped genetically. This is an 'ossification' and therefore a ruination of language, and the only possible remedy for it rests with what science is able to see by constantly renewing itself from the very center of its intuition and with the rejuvenated and living technology created by this renewal.

Schleiermacher's thinking is as follows: if we attempt to render a word's meaning with precision, ie. define it so narrowly that it can have no alternative meaning(s), we remove the word from its natural "genetic" context and fasten a precise, predetermined meaning to the word. The word becomes lifeless. It means one thing and no other; the word cannot change. Schleiermacher's use of the adverb "genetically" (which in my paraphrase becomes the adjective "genetic") reflects his belief that language is passed down generationally. Language has many uses and determinable origins; yet, once our desire for linguistic precision fixes a word to a specific meaning, we have done injustice to the tradition that first created that word. We must not, Schleiermacher believes, allow our deference for exactitude smother our communicative potential.

But there is another issue, not unrelated. JL Austin is famous for attempting to systematize previously un-systematize parts of English grammar, notably a group of linguistic phrases he called "performative." While the majority of uses of the word "promise" are captured by grammar school classifications, Austin points out that the first person present usage of "promise" is not as clearly classified. For example I can say, "I promise to be good," but the content of that sentence is not clearly identified. When I say, "I promise...," do I simply state that a promise has been enacted on my part, or do the words themselves do the work of promising?

This question, which drives much of Austin's 1955 William James Lecture, is not the main concern of this post. Rather I am interested in a corollary to Austin's central argument, namely the following:

...as utterances our performatives are are also heir to certain other kinds of ill which infect all utterances... a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance-- a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways-- intelligibly-- used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use-- ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language.

Austin does not say another word about any such "doctrine"; he brushes aside these special circumstances and proceeds with analyses of "normal" word usage. But it is clear that this is a tactical maneuver away from Charybdis. Etiolation of language is a problem posed by allowing too much creativity in language and Austin avoids it by excluding all literary creativity from his discussion of performative utterances.

Whatever his motivations, Austin's "etiolated language collolary" is this:

If any utterance is said by an actor on the stage or introduced in a poem or spoken in soliloquy, then it is void (or 'peculiarly' hollow).

We might interpret this in the same manner we interpret Schleiermacher's worry over ossification, that is, by stressing the vast contexts involved in every utterance. The actor's words are hollow by virtue of the "fourth wall" dividing the world of the play from the world of the spectator; the actors words are cut off from the real world and prevented from achieving further contextualization beyond the play. There are, of course, two problems with this corollary. The first is that we often do contextualize beyond the play. The second is that theology often imbues soliloquent speech with vast meaning. At least part of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics aims at understanding this kind of speech, so we cannot take it for granted that Schleiermacher and Austin's concerns overlap.

In my view they touch ever so slightly at a horizon. We can neither be exact nor completely free in our speech and writing. Better yet, precise language is not restricted language; while computers can be restrictively programmed to use one and only one 'word' for one and only 'object' or 'action,' we may find it impossible to program a computer to attend to all objects or actions. Humans, on the other hand, can do this if not individually then socially. Our ability to do this comes from the root of language as an active and interpersonal technique. Hence the original, organic uses of the words ossify and etiolate are borrowed (intentionally or not) by philosophers of language to signal the importance of language as an instrument of life and living.