Words, words, words.

An up and coming young member of the Yale Mafia has just meta-posted about posting. Included are gems like this:

"I hate language. Language is imprecise. Language is malleable. When I want to communicate precisely, I’d rather not have the ability to combine reasoning and verbal play. I might enjoy using verbal tricks for fun, but sometimes it is best to be forced to say exactly what you mean."

Beating down the lurking suspicion that I'm speaking to the ghost of Wittgenstein, I have two criticisms of this sentiment.

1) "Verbal tricks" allow us to communicate far wider nuances of meaning than straight prose. To those who are unconvinced that there are ideas communicable through poetry that cannot be expressed through prose, even given an infinite sheet of paper and infinite time; I'd submit the possibility that the form of communication has an effect upon the act of perception itself, leading us to the conclusion that Nietzsche, Hofstadter, and Marshall McLuhan were right all along: "The medium is the message."

2) Even if words are bad, we would do well to keep them under control as Irving Babbitt observed nearly a century ago:

"The man who wishes to be at once modern and civilized will not oppose to the Baconian or Rousseauistic onesidedness a mere appeal to the past, but a more accurate definition. Aristotle was, according to Bacon, the 'vile plaything of words.' As a matter of fact, the surest way to become the vile plaything of words is, like both Bacon and Rousseau, to look on visible and concrete objects as 'real' and on words, in contrast with these objects, as unreal.

Words, especially abstract words, have such an important relation to reality because they control the imagination which in turn determines action and so 'governs mankind.' The way to escape from the tyranny of words is not to dismiss them as unreal in favor of objects of sense, but to submit them to a searching Socratic dialectic. The only way, for instance, not to be the dupe of the general term 'work' is to divide of 'dichotomize' it Socratically and so become aware of the different meanings of which it is susceptible." ~ Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (1924)

Wittgenstein's attack upon naive approaches to definition is constructive rather then destructive because he leaves us with something better: Words being defined by their roles in our language. As Babbitt stresses, it's vital that we get a hold on these roles because otherwise we fall prey to sophistic and one-sided redefinitions which carry great emotive power (cf. Rousseau, Marx, Rawls, Bush, etc.)