The primary step in literary composition is invention, or the discovering of something to talk about. No writer is finally able to make good the claim that his subject matter is one thing and his style of expression another; the subject matter enters into the expression inevitably and extensively, although sometimes in ways too subtle for elucidation. What of the invention of this passage? If we take the word in its etymological sense of “finding,” are not these distinctions “findings” for findings’ sake? Analysis carried to such a humorless extreme reflects discredit upon the very principle of division which was employed.
It may appear contradictory to call the social scientist a “tendentious dialectician” and a “pedantic empiricist” at the same time. But the contradiction is inherent in his situation and merely expresses the equivocation found earlier. In all likelihood the empiricism is an attempt to compensate for the dialectic. If a writer feels guilty about his dialectic exercises (his definitions), he may seek to counterweight them with long empirical inquiries. The object of the empirical analysis is primarily to give the work a scientific aspect and only secondarily to prove something. In fact, this is almost the pattern of inferior social science literature.
III
Does social science writing suffer from a melioristic bias? This question directs our attention to the matter of vocabulary. There is danger in criticising any writer’s vocabulary through application of simple principles, because demands vary widely. For some purposes a small vocabulary of denotative terms will be satisfactory. Other purposes cannot be adequately met without a large and learned vocabulary which may, incidentally, sound pretentious. Our question then becomes whether the ends of social science are being well served by the means employed. For example, social scientists are often charged with addiction to polysyllabic vocabulary. Other men of learning show the same addiction, but there are special reasons for weighing critically the polysyllabic diction of social scientists.
Of course, when one faces the issue concretely, one discovers that there is no single standard by which a word is classified “big.” Some words are called “big” because they actually have four or five syllables and hence are measurably so; other words of one or two syllables are called “big” because, coming out of technical or scientific vocabularies, they are unfamiliar to the average man;[161] others, actually no longer, are called “big” because of the company they keep; that is to say, they are words of learned or dignified association. Sometimes a word seems big when it is simply too pretentious for the kind of thing it is describing. Readers of H. L. Mencken will recall that he obtained many of his best satirical effects by describing what was essentially picayune or tawdry in a vocabulary of grandiloquence.
A cursory inspection will show that social scientists are given to words which are “big” in yet another respect: they have a Latin origin. Even in analysis of simple phenomenon the reader comes to expect a parade of terms which seem to go by on stilts, as if it were important to keep from touching the ground. Without raising questions of semantic theory, one inclines to wonder about their relationship to their referents. In course of time one may come to suspect that the words employed are not dictated by the subject matter, but by some active principle out of sociological theory. To see whether that suspicion has a foundation, let us try a test on a specimen of this language.
The passage which will be used is fairly representative of the ordinary social science prose to be encountered in articles and reports. The subject is expressed in the title “Social Nearness among Welfare Institutions”:
It was noticed in the preceding sections that the social welfare organizational milieu presents an interdependence, a formal solidarity, a coerced feeling of unity. However divergent the specific objectives of each organization, theoretically they all have a common purpose, the care of the so-called underprivileged. Whether they execute what they profess or not is a different question and one which does not fall within the confines of these pages.[162]