Footnote pHH34

pHH34. In 1956, Russell lashed the plain language movement, which of course he knew to have been a legacy of Wittgenstein as championed by Ryle.

Russell gives us a fable:

The professor of mental philosophy, when called by his bedmaker one morning developed a dangerous frenzy, and had to be taken away by the police in an ambulance. I heard a colleague, a believer in "common usage," asking the poor philosopher's doctor about the occurrence. The doctor replied that the professor had had a temporary psychotic instability, which had subsided after an hour. The believer in "common usage," insofar as objecting to the doctor's language, repeated it to other inquirers. But it happened that I, who live on the professor's staircase, overheard the following dialogue between the bedmaker and the policeman:

Policeman: 'Ere, I want a word with yer.

Bedmaker: What do you mean -- 'a word'? I ain't done nothing.

Policeman: Ah, that's just it. Yer ought to 'ave done something. Couldn't yer see the pore gentleman was mental?

Bedmaker: That I could. For an 'ole 'our 'e went on something chronic. But when they're mental, you can't make them understand.

In this little dialogue, "word," "mean," "mental," and "chronic"are all used in accordance with common usage. They are not so used in the pages of Mind by those who pretend that common usage, as determined by mass observation, statistics, medians, standard deviations, and the rest of the apparatus. What they believe in is the usage of persons who have their amount of education, neither more nor less. Less is illiterate, more is pedantry -- as we are given to understand.

From Portraits from Memory (Allen and Unwin 1956) as quoted in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Dennon, editors (Simon and Schuster 1961).

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