Language--A "Cultural Technology"

Edited from conversation elsewhere--

The more one looks at language behavior, the more slippery it becomes, especially so as regards abstraction and idealization.

One knows, for example, what a chair is by design by function, but what is that in the mind that suffices for "chair" and then how does that makes its way into "chair a meeting" or "chair person" or "chairman"?

When I was teaching, I introduced students to metonymy and how clusters of sounds and associations between words produced probable but not necessarily locked meanings (so that "fireplace" means "fireplace" and "stockings" mean "stockings" until the two in proximity in a Christianized culture--"fireplace" + "stockings"--come to suggest, symbolically, Christmas).

Interest and arguments involving "deconstruction" in literary terms have a religious character all their own, but it may be worth noting here that language behavior is natural (virtually every human acquires a language); that observation of it lends itself to the construction of grammatical rules that catch its patterns but do not create them; and that everything that exists in language refers to something that exists at minimum in the mind.

I regard language as a "cultural technology", and perhaps that is most visible in the reconsideration of religious texts and their relationship to culture.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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