Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

harmless attitudes or beliefs

Yesterday afternoon a book arrived in the mail: Robert A. Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone! in its first, hard-cover, vanity press (Linguistica—Ithaca, NY) edition. Sadly, the tepidly retitled second edition (Linguistics and Your Language), is out of print, though it’s rather easy to find. It’s in good condition, except for some red pencilled underlining and marginalia. Its dust jacket is chipped, but the picture (which I must scan soon and post) of Professor Hall is priceless.

We have two main points to make [in Part IV]: 1) that a science of language exists; and 2) that we can learn something from it which will ease our troubles and help towards solving some of our problems connected with language.

Our basic technique will be much like that of “shock treatment” that psychiatrists often use. When a person has built up a way of life based on harmless attitudes or beliefs, the psychiatrist has to sweap this false basis away before he can replace it by new, more realistic and therefore sounder ideas. Often enough, a temporary confusion or disorientation may result, because of bewilderment and loss of cherished illusions. But this is really a favorable sign, since it represents the beginning of a healthy attitude and true udnerstanding of the problems involved. In the same way, our discussion will intentionally aim first at showing how little real foundation there is for many of the ideas we have about language, in order to replace them with a better understanding of its nature and function. Of necessity, therefore, our first part will be primarily negative in its approach, clearing the ground, as it were, for the more realistic and more helpful positive conclusions to be presented in the rest of the book.

[Robert A. Hall Jr. 1950. Leave Your Language Alone!, pp7f.]

Synchronistically, I also just came across this entry in a new (to me) blog.