There occur in this short excerpt about a dozen words of Latin origin for which equivalents of Anglo-Saxon (or old English, if the name is preferred) origin are available, and this without giving up presumably operational terms like “organizational” and “milieu.”[163] In place of “noticed,” why not “seen”? In place of “divergent,” why not “unlike”? In place of “objective,” why not “goal”? Instead of “execute what they profess,” why not “do what they say”? Did these terms not suggest themselves to the writer, or were they deliberately passed by?
It might be arbitrary to insist that any one of these substitutes is better than the original, but the piling-up of such terms causes language to take on a special aspect. There are, of course, margins within which preference in terminology means little, but a preference for Latinate terms as marked as this must be, to employ one of their customary expressions, “significant.”
That significance lies in the kind of attitude that social scientists must have in order to practice social science. It seems beyond dispute that all social science rests upon the assumption that man and society are improvable. That is its origin and its guiding impulse. The man who does not feel that social behavior and social institutions can be bettered through the application of scientific laws, or through some philosophy finding its basic support in them, is surely out of place in sociology. There would really be nothing for him to do. He could only sit on the sidelines and speculate dourly, like Nietzsche, or ironically, like Santayana. The very profession which the true social scientist adopts compels him to be a kind of a priori optimist. This is why a large part of social science writing displays a melioristic bias. It is under compulsion, often unconsciously felt, I am sure, to picture things a little better than they are. Such expression provides a kind of proof that its theories are “working.”
An indubitable connection exists between the melioristic bias and a Latinate vocabulary. Even a moderate sensitivity to the overtones of language will tell one that diction of Latin derivation tends to be euphemistic. For this there seem to be both extrinsic and intrinsic causes. It is a commonplace of historical knowledge that after the Norman Conquest the Anglo-Saxons were forced into a servile role. They were sent into the fields to do chores for the Norman overlords, and Anglo-Saxon names have clung to the things with which they worked. Thus to the Anglo-Saxon in the field the animal was “cow”; to the Norman, when the same animal was served at his table, it was “beef” (L. bos, bovis). So “calf” is translated “veal”; “thegn” becomes “servant”; “folk” becomes “people,” and so on. This distinction of common and elegant terms persists in an area of our vocabulary today. Another circumstance was that Latin for centuries constituted the language of learning and of the professions throughout Europe, and from the fourteenth century onward, there occurred a large amount of “learned borrowing.”[164] This reflects the fact that those cultures which carried civility and politesse to highest perfection drew from a Latin source. Finally, I would suggest that the greater number of syllables in many Latinate terms is a factor in the effect. Whatever the complete explanation, the truth remains that to give a thing a Latinate name is to couple it with social prestige and with the world of ideas, whereas to give it a name out of Anglo-Saxon is to forgo such dignifying associations. Thus “combat” sounds more dignified than “fight”; “labor” has resonances which “work” does not have; “impecunious” seems to indicate a more hopeful condition than “needy” or “penniless”; “involuntary separation” sounds less painful than “getting fired.” The list could be extended indefinitely. With exceptions too few to make a difference, the Anglo-Saxon word is plain and workaday, whereas the word of Latin derivation seems to invest whatever it describes with a certain upward tendency. Of course, the Anglo-Saxon word has its potencies, but they are not those of the other. It seems to cling to the brute empirical fact, while its Latinate counterpart seems at once to become ideological, with perhaps a slight aura of hortation about it. Whenever one hears the average man condemning a piece of discourse as “flowery,” it is most likely that he is pointing, with the only term at his command, to an excess of Latinate diction.
In the same connection, let us remember that the last few years have seen much newspaper wit at the expense of the language of government bureaucracy, which is even more responsive to the melioristic bias. The bureaucrat lives in a world where nothing is incorrigible; the solution to every contemporary difficulty waits only for the devising of some appropriate administrative machinery. Compared with him, the social scientist is a realist, for social science at least begins by admitting that many situations leave something to be desired. The bureaucrat’s world is prim and proper and aseptic, and his language reflects it (perhaps one could say that the discourse of the bureaucrat is social science “politicalized”). At any rate, here we might profitably look at a specimen of bureaucratic parlance from Masterson and Phillips’ Federal Prose, a recently published burlesque of official language. The authors posed for themselves as one exercise the problem of how a bureaucrat would express the ancient adage “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” Their translation is a caricature, but, like caricature, it brings out the dominant features of the subject: “Undue multiplicity of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel.”[165] One notices, first of all, the leap into polysyllabic diction, along with the total disappearance of those homely entities “cooks” and “broth.” “Personnel,” for example, is an abstract dignifier, and “resultant product” is safe, since it does not leave the writer on record as affirming that the concoction in question actually is broth. He is further protected by the expunging of “spoil,” with its positive assertion, and he can hide behind the relativity of “deterioration of quality ... as compared with....”
Such language, when used to express the phenomenology of social and political behavior, gives a curious impression of being foreign to its subject matter. The impression of foreignness may be explained as follows. In all writing which has come to be regarded as wisdom about the human being, there is an undertone of the sardonic. Man at his best is a sort of caricature of himself, and even when we are eulogizing him for his finer attributes, there has to be a minor theme of depreciation, much as a vein of comedy weaves in and out of a great tragedy. The “great” actions of history appear either sublime or ridiculous, depending on one’s standpoint, and it may be the part of sagacity to regard them as both at the same time. This note of the sardonic is found in biblical wisdom, in Plato’s realism of situations, and even in Aristotle’s dry categorizing. It appears in the Federalist papers,[166] as the authors, while debating political theory in high terms, kept a cagey eye upon economic man. Man is neither an angel nor any kind of disembodied spirit, and the attempt to treat him as such only arouses our sense of the ridiculous. The comic animal must be there before we can grant that the representation is “true.” The typical social science report, even when it discusses situations in which baseness and irrationality figure prominently, does not get in this ingredient. Every social fact may be serious, but not every social action is serious because action is not fully explainable without motive. It is this abstract man which causes some of us to wonder about the predications of an unhumanistic social science.
The remedy might be to employ, except where the necessity of conceptualizing makes it difficult, something nearer the language of the biblical parable (one shudders to think how our bureaucrat would render “A sower went forth to sow”), or the language of the best British journalism. I have often felt that writers on social science might learn a valuable lesson from the limpid prose of the Manchester Guardian. There one usually finds statement without eulogistic or dyslogistic tendency, adequacy without turgidity. It is perhaps the nearest thing we have in practice to that supposititious reality, objective language. There is some truth in the observation of John Peale Bishop that, whereas American English is more vigorous, English English is far more accurate. A good reportorial medium will be, to a considerable extent, an English English, and it will reflect something of the English genius for fact.
To sum up, the melioristic bias is a deflection toward language which glosses over reality without necessarily giving us a philosophic vocabulary. One could go so far as to say that such language is comparatively lacking in responsibility. It is the language that one expects from those who have become insulated or daintified. It carries a slight suggestion of denial of evil, which in lay circles, as in some ecclesiastical ones, is among the greatest heresies. Perhaps the sociologist would inspire more confidence as a social physician if his language had more of the candor described above, and almost certainly he would get a better understanding of his diagnosis.