The Tradeoffs of Language

The gifts (and curses) of gab

Rob’s story:

I sometimes read books about war. In one of them—the title of which is lost in the misty fog of my memory—the author gently pokes fun of the way that soldiers communicate, putting sentences like this one in their mouths: I was outside the FOB with the LT—he’s on the 50—in an APC and we’re 10-19 to the DFAC at our POO when bam, IED…¹

Steve Pinker, in The Language Instinct, makes a tight case that the function of language is to communicate. I have all these very interesting ideas in my brain, but you can’t see them, so to get them from my brain to yours, I package my ideas into words, put those words into air waves or text, and you unpack them to derive my meaning.

This process is not perfect. For example, two different ideas can be in the same package. If I say that I’m going to the bank, you don’t know if I’m preparing for a financial transaction or a day at the beach. Josh has more to say on that below.

Still, language does a pretty good job of moving ideas around.

How good a job it does depends on many factors. I’ll discuss a few, and Josh will discuss a few.

Take efficiency, how much information is conveyed over time. To return to the military example, there is just a ton of information in there, much of it condensed into really tiny bits, in the form of abbreviations or code numbers. This kind of information density is possible when the person doing the packing and the person doing the unpacking have a lot of shared assumptions, context, and knowledge. For soldiers, conveying a lot of information very fast can be a matter of life and death. You don’t want to take the time to yell rocket propelled grenade when one is fired; you just want to yell RPG to give listeners the extra time to take action. Because everyone is trained on the same vocabulary, communication is fast and relatively free from ambiguity.²

Now, another important fact about language is that it can be used for more than moving ideas around. As discussed in some detail in Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind, language can send signals beyond just the ideas in that person’s head. If I tell you that I use language to show that I’m smart, well, you might learn something about me, but if I tell you that, through the meticulous deployment of esoteric lexemes and syntactically elaborate constructions, I endeavor to manifest a facade of intellectual preeminence, well, now you learn that I know a lot of words and that I’m pretentious. The key point is that language communicates the meanings bundled in the words themselves, but speech acts also send signals.

A third fact of language is that in addition to the listener learning about the speaker, the speaker can learn about the listener. By packing my words in certain ways, I, as a speaker, can find out if you have the needed assumptions, background, and knowledge to unpack them. So, if I say, “Man, this year Hollywood has literally been on fire” and you don’t laugh, then I know that you don’t follow the news closely. (Or that it’s too soon. Probably it’s too soon.) The joke, ill-considered as it might be, gives me the opportunity to learn something about you.

Returning to the military, I once read about a case which was presented as true but I have no way of knowing. Apparently, engineers on ships occasionally get irritated by people who are “assisting” when they are doing repairs. On one such occasion, the engineer told a subordinate that to complete the repair, he would need a part, specifically a “fallopian tube.” The subordinate duly went to the ship’s supply master, who found no entry for such a part and, allegedly, the request got passed on and on and eventually bumped all the way up to an admiral in the Pentagon, who had a hearty laugh.

From this, the engineer was able to show that he knew a word that the others didn’t, which might have been fun for him.

The ability to pack ideas into words that a listener might not know enough to unpack properly is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing for those who want a way to signal their erudition or the size of their lexicon. It’s a curse for those on the receiving end.

One aspect of the curse is to do with the fact that sometimes people don’t know, don’t care, or plain forget that they are communicating with people who can’t unpack the dense information they package up in words, abbreviations, or impenetrable sentence constructions. If you’ve ever been to a car repair shop and the person says, yeah, your delimotron valve isn’t displanicating the framler, you know what I’m talking about. (For Rick and Morty fans, you can substitute how the dingleblop and grumbo are used to make a plumbus.) In some professions, they want you to know that they know stuff you don’t, possibly to persuade you that they are worth whatever price they are charging you.

There are many reasons a person might communicate something that has little chance of being understood. For people who are well enmeshed in a community, it’s not all that hard to forget that not everyone shares their vocabulary. In these cases, it’s not that the speaker is trying to signal they know something you don’t, it’s just that they forgot you don’t know something they do. So when the technician tells you that you need a new delimotron, he might simply have forgotten that non-experts don’t know what one is. But he might also be trying to persuade you that he’s worth the price he’s charging because of his arcane delimotron expertise.

The curse of the curse is that it can be hard to tell the difference. Is this person confusing me because they want to show off, or are they confusing me because they don’t realize that I don’t share their knowledge of technical language and abbreviations?

My view is that this dynamic is at its worst in academia.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some good reasons that scholarship can be like military jargon. Among specialists, writers can more or less correctly assume that readers share their background knowledge because they are specialists in the area. It can be efficient to pack a lot of information into a paper, knowing that the intended readers can unpack it. This is how I think about figures, tables, and charts. These are ways to pack a lot of information in a small space. So, some scholarship is impossible to parse by lay folk for the simple reason that it isn’t intended for them. Fair enough.

On the other hand, some disciplines have adopted convoluted and nearly impenetrable language not for any of these (good) reasons, but for strategic reasons akin to our mechanic above. Follow this link for an example of a sentence so bad, it won an award. Scholars in the humanities emphatically don’t write like this for the same reason that a scholar in, physics, say, writes a sentence such as this one:

An alternative approach to circumvent the sign problem might be to describe lattice field theories in the equivalent Hamiltonian formalism, instead of the pathintegral description based on the Lagrangian formalism.

Physicists write like that because their readers know what a lattice field is and what the Lagrangian formalism is. (For the record, I do not, in either case.)

In contrast, in many areas of scholarship—most in the humanities, less as one climbs the social sciences from sociology to economics—scholars use opaque prose as a strategy to mask a lack of substantive content or to shield weak arguments from scrutiny. Complex terms don’t allow readers to digest the argument easily and succinctly; authors are, instead, trying to cultivate an aura of profundity while, at the same time, making it challenging for peers and critics to engage critically with their work. (It’s not that hard to tell what’s really going on, as the so-called grievance studies affair showed.)

Generally, scholars who use intentionally opaque language are signaling that they belong to the intellectual elite, where only those versed in the esoteric jargon are considered part of the in-group. Further, because the ideas are so difficult to penetrate, they are not subject to same level of scrutiny as ideas in other fields, such as physics. That is, of course, the hope of these “scholars” because their ideas are often so silly they aren’t even well formed enough to be right or wrong.

If these authors truly wanted their ideas to spread, they would write them in a way that people could understand. They emphatically do not.

Josh’s story:

Totally Tubular, Man!

A long time ago, humans ate tubers. You know, stuff like potatoes, jicama, and cassavas. Only we didn’t cook them—we chewed them raw. Then humans figured out how to cook with fire, which is sometimes referred to as “external digestion.” Cooking allowed humans’ teeth, jaws, and intestines to shrink considerably, along with the time required to search for, gnaw on, and digest food.

What became of this extra time and energy? Anatomically, humans evolved bigger brains and smaller jaws. They were also able to spend more of their time doing other things with their mouths—like talking to one another.

Language allows for a level of social complexity that would be impossible without it, from the transmission of cultural knowledge to the expression of abstract thought. The form of complexity that tends to preoccupy me, though, is that language allows people to say one thing and mean another. Successfully navigating social life requires an ability to tell the difference. Otherwise you find yourself on the ninth green at nine.

Happy not happy

Putting the Gas in Gaslighting

Plenty of animals use deception to their advantage, meaning plenty of animals must be able to recognize the deception of others, whether of their own species or another. But no organism navigates as much deception as Homo sapiens, and that is thanks to our complex language abilities.

Like water with limestone, language widens the gap between what we mean, intend, or believe—and what we state, publicly and for the record. Language creates more layers of meaning than behavior can alone.

For example, a client recently advised me to buy a towel warmer for Christmas. I replied: “Good idea, I’ll look into it.” But I had no intention of looking into it. We tell these white lies all the time, but sometimes they are not so white. Before tipping me onto towel warmers, in fact, my client had described the most befuddling experience: someone he he’d been dating told him right up to the moment she broke up with him how much she liked him.

Language deceives us in the first and most basic sense by promising to describe reality. But much of the time, it can’t. At least, not fully or exactly. No matter what string of words we use, describing an emotion or experience only ever amounts to a clunky approximation. Our effort to capture experience with language is sort of like throwing a blanket over a stampeding buffalo: even if the blanket lands perfectly, it will soon slide off the beast. Surely this is what led Nathaniel Hawthorne to write: “When we see how little we can express, it is a wonder that any man ever takes up a pen a second time.”

In addition to being a vehicle for deception, then, language also sometimes carries an opportunity cost; by falsely promising to capture reality, it deters us from alternate forms of expression which might hit nearer to the mark. Without language, we might in some cases find a better way to communicate something, or might rely much less on communication. Anyone who has traveled abroad can attest to how the absence of a shared language occasionally shortcuts the process of arriving at a shared understanding. Likewise, in It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey stops mid-stream in his rambling conversation with Mary and asks “Am I talking too much?” An old man who has been eavesdropping their conversation cannot help himself and jumps in: “Yes, just kiss her already!”

Communication itself is often helpful in bringing about certain outcomes, but other times it can get in the way. For example, if I’m playing basketball, it’s much better for me to make a cut to the basket rather than shout: “I’m going to the basket!”³ Same with having to use the restroom at a party. No point in telling someone beforehand, or holding your crotch along the way, to communicate what you are about to do. Just do it.

Of course, language usually makes communication easier, and communication itself is usually a net-positive. Humans are currently dominating the game of life in large part because of our sophisticated communication.

Language being a technology—albeit an evolved one—the argument made by Weinstein and Heying applies: “The benefits are obvious, but the hazards are not.”⁴ Yet even if the balance of tradeoffs for language were negative, it will still be adopted because it allows adopters to outcompete holdouts. Groups that were able to communicate with one another outperformed groups that were not, just as individuals who were able to write “I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare” fared better romantically than those who could not.

But it is indeed interesting to walk around and wonder what life would be like without language. Would we in some instances be better off? Would we cut to the heart of the matter without dancing around so much? Perhaps language, for many people in many situations, acts as a filibuster; roundabout conversation gives them an excuse to block any meaningful action. The ways in which our lives would be unimaginable or impossible without language, though, are much easier to call to mind.

The Specialized Language of Therapy

Specialized language, as a subset of language, contains many of the tradeoffs of language overall. Rob discussed some of these, with the main difficulty being, for the listener, determining the intention of the specialized language. Is it to make me feel small or to make me reach for my wallet? Or is it simply because the other person doesn’t know that I don’t know?

Personally, I become apoplectic when professionals or experts use language that obscures my understanding of the situation. I become especially angry toward medical professionals because “the situation”—my health—is a pretty important one for me to understand. So, whenever a doctor uses a term or phrase I don’t understand, such as the “calcaneal-cuboid joint,” I ask them to explain the term, and then say as politely as I can: “Did you expect me to know that?” They are mostly so taken aback that they don’t answer the question—and probably conclude that I’m a dick—but my hope is that they’ve learned a valuable lesson.

This lesson is especially important for therapists. There is no justification for specialized language in therapy, neither between client and therapist nor between therapists.

I’ve been adamant since the beginning of Living Fossils that therapists have very little specialized or technical knowledge. Therapy is all about caring, listening, understanding, and making sense of the client’s life. Why would therapists ever move away from simple, everyday language then? Why would they ever put distance between them and their clients?

Fancy language tends to create confusion and erect a power structure. As Rob mentioned, sometimes these tradeoffs are worth it, but in the case of mental health, they are not. This is because most of the technical language in the field, from repression to individuation to maladaptive thoughts, was created as part of founding a new technique. Most of these terms were forged in the effort to mint a new therapeutic method—or modality, if we want to be confusing for no good reason. Given that differences in approach make little to no difference in therapeutic outcomes, though, is all this extra language justified? No.

As a counter-example, I have recently been deep-diving the anatomy of the foot due to some foot pain. I can tell you a lot about the foot now, including about the calcaneal-cuboid joint. When my podiatrist first whipped this term out, however, and I became angry at his assumption that I would know what it meant, I was at least comforted by the knowledge that it referred to something real. Something physical, that I could touch with my hand or see in an MRI. There is little hard reality, as of yet, to what psychologists know—and the same can be said for most of the sciences that deal with human behavior, the aptly-named “soft sciences.”

I do not say this to downplay the value therapists offer. It is indeed the apathy of so many medical professionals, coupled with the disjointedness of the medical system—to say nothing of the chaos and absurdity of modern life at large—that makes the careful, deliberate attention of the therapist so powerful.⁵ To me, the only value of fancy language in therapy is to strengthen the placebo effect, but I think this can be done in more authentic ways.

The same goes for conversations among therapists, including clinical research. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve seen or been a part of that went in circles because each participant was committed to their bundle of words, from their chosen orientation, that nobody else understood.

“Ah, it sounds like your client is going through repetition-compulsion. In taking the first job offered, he can return to complaining. He can continue playing the role of victim with which he is so comfortable.”

“Well, what you’re touching on is a systemic issue. Workers simply aren’t paid enough in today’s capitalist system.”

“I’d bet generalization is at play here. Because he has to take what he can get in his romantic relationships, he assumes the same will be true in every domain in life.”

“Does it have anything to do with your relationship? I mean, you advised him to hold out for something better, which he ignored, so it seems like a piece of transference to me.”

It’s like watching a gunfight with cap guns, only the participants expect that at any moment their bullet might pierce the other person. They won’t.

In addition to rallying around common factors, then—i.e., the components of therapy that all techniques share, which deliver the bulk the benefit—clinical psychologists should rally around common language. There’s no good reason not to.

Tricks of the Trade

Many have reinforced the value to me of simple language. My high-school Latin teacher was the first to turn me onto word economy, and many English and poetry teachers since piled on. Rob often writes in the margins of my early drafts “omit needless words” from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Hemingway once said: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” Finally, my supervisor has always said: “Your words are your medicine. Don’t overdose your clients.”

Therapists are taught some techniques, such as open-ended questioning, to help facilitate conversation. But the main priority is always to use simple, direct, and personalized language.⁶ I sometimes concoct such a horrendous sentence in an effort to make it open-ended that I have to remind myself: first, make sense. Also, the simplest language is no language at all, otherwise known as silence. So often people say something inaccurate or misleading because they feel the pressure to say something. I find myself doing this in social settings all the time—talking to fill silence—but I learned a long time ago to avoid this in therapy. If I have nothing to say, I say nothing. The automatic responses that make so much of social life meaningless, from “see you soon” to “totally, I’d love to do that!” have no place in therapy.

Patting Ourselves on the Back

Rob and I are firm believers—Rob even more so than me—in clear, democratic language. We try to justify every time we use a fancy word, and if there is no justification, we back down to a simpler one. We make our articles free for the same reason: any motivated, fluent speaker should be able to understand exactly what we are saying and benefit from any value it might provide.

This is a change that needs to happen more broadly across our society and within academia and healthcare especially. There’s a reason people don’t turn to academic papers for truth, even though that is where truth can most reliably be found. Likewise, there is a reason people avoid the doctor’s office. It’s not exclusively due to a language and knowledge gap, but that’s certainly part of it. This gap becomes particularly excruciating when you are trying to navigate your health insurance and are caught between the medical jargon of the doctor and the administrative fluff of the insurance company. All the average consumer knows, in the midst of this babble, is that they are confused, worried, and in pain.

Fortunately, AI has come to save the day, and I say that as someone generally suspicions of technology (or have you not noticed?). AI programs are excellent translators, whether you want to parse a foreign language or particularly obtuse instance of your own.

We are hoping that more academics answer the call put forward by Steven Pinker and Peter DeScioli, among others, to simplify their language. Everyone, in fact, can have an honest reckoning with their intentions. When you speak, what are you trying to do? Show that you have power over someone? Show that you’re hot stuff? If so, use all the specialized, technical language you can.

But if you’re trying to communicate an idea, or be a partner in a venture, be simple. Omit needless words.

1. Roughly, “I was outside the base with the lieutenant—he’s manning the mounted machine gun—in an armored vehicle, and we were heading back to the dining facility at our point of origin when suddenly, there was an explosion from an improvised explosive device.”

2. I don’t mean to imply that’s the only reason. For example, coded language is also useful to reduce the chance that others, especially enemies, will be able to understand what you’re saying easily.

3. This is for the same reasons Rob mentioned with the military jargon: it saves time and prevents my opponent from knowing what I’m going to do.

4. A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century, p. 98.

5. We might say that medicine is much hard knowledge and little bedside manner, whereas therapy is little hard knowledge and much bedside manner.

6. Which is to say, language that particular client is likely to understand. If they’re a medical professional, in other words, then I can use “calcaneal-cuboid joint.”