Lederer on Language

On Language

For most of us, language is like the air we breathe. Like air, language is invisible and all around us. We need it to live, yet we take it for granted. If, however, we pause and examine our language thoughtfully, we discover that the ordinary language user is astonishingly creative.

Without realizing it, we all spend most of our waking hours inventing language. Incredible as it may seem at first thought, practically every sentence that you speak and write during your lifetime has never been spoken or written before in human history. Except for stock phrases and conventional remarks, such as "How are you?" "Thanks a lot," and "Have a nice day," almost all of your speech and writing consists of sentences that you have made up. You are a language inventor. Consider, for example, an experiment conducted by Richard Ohmann, a professor at Wesleyan University, who placed before twenty-five people a fairly simple cartoon and asked them to describe in a sentence the situation the drawing portrayed.

Not surprisingly, the twenty-five descriptions that Professor Ohmann received were all different: "A bear is occupying a phone booth, while a tourist impatiently waits in line." "A man who was driving along the road has stopped and is waiting impatiently for a grizzly bear to finish using the public phone." "A traveler waits impatiently as a bear chatters gaily in a highway telephone booth."

Then Professor Ohmann used a computer to determine how many grammatical sentences in English could be generated from the raw materials in just those twenty-five sentences about the agitated tourist and the bear in the telephone booth. How many would you guess? Five thousand? Ten thousand? Maybe twenty-five thousand? Professor Ohmann's computer yielded 19.8 billion! Ñearly twenty billion English sentences that depict one limited state of affairs culled from only twenty-five different statements. It would take about forty human life spans to speak 19.8 billion sentences, even at high speed. Other computer studies have shown that it would take ten trillion years, two thousand times the estimated age of the earth to utter all the possible English sentences that use exactly twenty words. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that any twenty-word sentence an individual speaks has ever been spoken previously. The same conclusion holds, of course, for sentences of greater length and for most shorter sentences as well. That is why almost every sentence that you are reading in The Vocabula Review, as well as in all the books, newspapers, and magazines that have been written and are yet to be written, is expressed, or will be expressed, in its exact form for the very first time. There is one more intriguing fact to consider. Not only do you spend your days reading sentences that you have never before encountered, but you understand almost every one of them. Part of your humanness is your ability both to invent new sentences and to comprehend the verbal inventions of other people. If you enjoyed this article, let your friends read it, too

Richard Lederer

Richard Lederer is the author of more than 3,000 books and articles about language and humor, including Anguished English and The Bride of Anguished English. Dr. Lederer's syndicated column, "Looking at Language," appears in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. He is also a language commentator on public radio. His latest book is A Man of My Words: Reflections on the English Language.