Language in action

What this book hopes to do is to present certain principles of interpretation, or semantic principles, which are intended to act as a kind of intellectual air-purifying and air-conditioning system to prevent the poisons of verbal superstition, primitive linguistic assumptions, and the more pernicious forms of propaganda from entering our systems. These poisons, if unchecked, wastefully consume our energies in the fighting of verbal bogey-men, reduce our intellectual efficiency, and may ultimately destroy our mental health and well being. Nature to some extent provides her own safeguards against these poisons, as she does against germs and dust in the atmosphere; that is, we all intuitively learn, and at least part of the time unconsciously practice, sane semantic principles. But we live in an environment shaped and partially created by hitherto unparalleled semantic influences: commercialized newspapers, commercialized radio programs, “public relation counsels,” and the propaganda technique of nationalistic madmen. Citizens of a modern society need, therefore, more than ordinary “horse sense”; they need to be scientifically aware of the mechanisms of interpretation if they are to guard themselves against being driven mad by the welter of words with which they are now faced.