{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

Richard Feringer: (Ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to see you all here at the first meeting...)

[tape interruption]

(...some of you may not believe me. We have a number of these brochures posted around the campus, and you can read a little bit about the many, many accomplishments of our speaker, the books he has written, some of the other things that he has done.

(I thought as an alternative, that I might just give a short, personal reference to Professor Huessy, dating back to the time when I met him in 1959, on the University of California campus. I had become acquainted with his writing several years before that time, and was delighted to have met him in 1959. But it's been especially interesting to me to meet other persons who have known Professor Rosenstock-Huessy, become acquainted with his works, because I have found without exception that these persons have been interesting, and extremely stimulating people themselves. I think this reflects my own view of tonight's speaker.

(One person, whom you may have heard, who's included -- included in this circle is Professor Page Smith, who was on our campus last summer, who was quite well received. And Page is one of Professor Rosenstock-Huessy's students from Dartmouth. And with this, it gives me great pleasure to present our speaker tonight, Professor Rosenstock-Huessy.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I am in a position today like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. I have no hat of my own for the two lectures announced, because the title of these two lectures, the -- the unifying title has been stolen. It has not been printed. So here I am having -- without a hat for my two lectures. The Hatter in Alice in Wonderland simply said he had borrowed his own hat from the hats he had to sell. He had no hat of his own. Now my problem is to make you see at the end of our -- time -- day -- two days better that there is a unifying title. But at this moment, there is not. I have to try to leave you a path without previous general introduction.

And let me take then the narrow path next to my own house, and -- this moment in Santa Cruz, in California. I lived there on one side of a big freeway. And on the other side is the Mission Santa Cruz, which was the first house built in this place by the Franciscans, in 1784. And across this big freeway, there leads

for the children who go to the mission school, a winding staircase and an arch crossing the freeway so that without danger, they can pass over it. And on the map--and now comes my hope that this will serve as an introduction--on the map that describes the freeway, and my house, and this mission, and the school, it reads: "Pedestrian separation" for this {bridge}.

Now I have never heard a less-fitting term for something very useful and very important. "Pedestrian separation." Obviously it's a convention. And it is not a pedestrian separation at all. But according to the Lingo of Linguistics, we have the right to define our terms as we please, so let us be a pedestrian separation, you see? And this is the question of all questions, and that is the problem of our meeting here: is linguistics in a position to master language, and tell us how to speak, what to speak, and to whom to speak?

Let me throw out the suggestion that this illness of "pedestrian separation" separates today humanity. Not only that whole nations and whole continents decline to speak to each other--we have such a violent suppression of speech to the Chinese for the last 15 years in this country; it's now breaking up, fortunately--but all told, there are more and more societies which disclaim any desire to speak to other societies. And for the first time in the history of human speech, people claim the right not to owe the truth to anybody outside their own realm of living.

I had just a letter from a Dutch { } missionary in Russia and Poland. He said, "The terrible thing is that the alleged Christians there are only half of them honest; and the others lie and are on the side of the Communists, and report only, and spy on us. And it's quite intolerable. And I have left my work there, I'm back in Holland now, because they don't know what truth is. They don't know the obligation put on us to be true. They make no distinction from one day -- they will be -- tell the truth; it's purely accidental."

Well, I think there are some groups in this country who think exactly the same about truth. And you don't have to be in advertising to be -- fear -- be fearful about the ways the human mind can persuade itself, that it doesn't owe all the truth to everybody.

Each then is today I think in a greater danger than it ever has been. And believe it or not, but my conviction is that the next hundreds of years will be a desperate fight for the survival of speech. Two and-a-half hours by the ordinary teenager are spent in front of television. That's enough to kill anybody's power to speak.

In 1890, so quite a while ago, there was a scholar; Abel was his name. He

wrote a strange book on the contrary sense -- contrary meaning of words. And he drew our attention to the fact that "high" and "deep"--"altus" in Latin--is an ambiguous word. It can mean one thing, you see, to be deep, or it can mean high. He thought the same of the colors, that "blue" and "black" could be the same word, sometimes used in one sense, and sometimes the other. And he had many other examples. And so he said that the first man only pointed to things perhaps--I don't believe this myself, at all--but he thought that -- language was ambiguous. It could mean two things; you had to be there to understand what your colleagues mean.

If you go to Japan, I am told--I haven't been there--one Japanese politely will say, "The weather is," and the other will say, "The weather is." And how it is, we will not say. Today, of course, it's a -- the { } is very beautiful, but tomorrow it won't. And therefore it was better not to pronounce a dangerous judgment on the character of the day, but invite both parts to form their own judgments together with the other. Quite an interesting idea of {protecting} the evidence.

The Lingo of Linguistics. Now {don't} -- start from this premise, that you can speak as we please, if we only define our terms. To define the term means to invent a new word, because it is rootless. It is completely independent of what the term could mean, just as "pedestrian separation." It should mean that people cannot get together and it does mean that they get together.

Now my problem today is to prove to you that this is not true, that language is not at all arbitrary, and that it is not in the ken of specialists, of professionals to determine -- define their terms. We have so many specialities today, and so -- as we -- so we have so many languages. And I -- they're only lingos, they are dialects. But what is a dialect? What is a lingo? What is an artificial language?

It's a language that can only be spoken to by people who have the same intention, who are -- who -- like any specialist--be it a repair work- -- worker, people who have to -- mend the car--they all have to agree what pliers are, if the word -- if the word "plier" was not understood by them. But the thing becomes very difficult if a poet goes by and applies himself to pliers, he will not think of pliers in any sense of the word. But he has a different specialty of a different profession. And language, in -- in contrast to lingo, only begins when people of different background, different history, different age, different time, speak the same language. Then it becomes language.

The language that a woman and a man speak to each other is the true fountainhead of all language, because -- since we have incest rules, and since the

day--and that was the first day in -- in paradise, that man was not allowed to marry his mother or his sister--he had to learn the language of his wife, and she had to learn his language --. And all real language has nothing to do with the themes of the linguistic schools of today, be it Russian, or be it American; because they ignore completely the fact that we all, in the middle of life--whether we become monks and take a vow to the Virgin Mary, or whether we marry a -- earthly per- -- person--we have to make two languages into one, two lingos, two dialects into one. Only where there is courtship is true language. And people who have never made love to a person don't know what language is. And they may be the learned dictionary-markers in the world, including Mr. Noah Webster.

Language is not a nomistic theme, listing words. But language is the power to be -- make yourself understood by a person who did not understand you the day before. And if you don't invent for your declaration of love to your sweetheart something highly original, you cannot make love and you cannot get married well. You will get divorced.

Yes, most people who are divorced never spoke the same language as their wife, and that's why they have to get a divorce. To -- to get married is a very slow process. And you don't know this, you see. I advise you not to wonder that people are divorced all the time. You can only wonder that not many more people are divorced all the time. Because they do not take the trouble, besides going to bed together, to learn to speak to each other. And that is marriage, a true marriage of two minds. And Shakespeare knew it, but we have -- seem to have forgotten it.

I never hear in the roles for marriage, laid down by all these wise counselors, ladies and men, that the people have to learn to speak to each other. They take the measurements, whether the breast is wide enough, and the -- the {statue} is right, and the color of the eyes, {fits} the other partner. This is certainly indifferent. Can they speak to each other a new language that has never been spoken before? Every couple speaks a new language. And linguistics have absolutely nothing to do with this, as they are handled today, because they only speak of people defining their terms, which is perfectly uninteresting. Of course, apes can define their terms. Humanity, however, has to renew the eternal language of mankind, in a special case of falling in love with the partner of the other -- another home. And that's why incest and language have very much to do with each other. Where you have incest, you have no language. And that's the reason why it is -- as a degeneration forbidden by -- in the oldest tribes. In no tribe do you find the right to marry the mother, or the daughter, or the sister, because they would have perished, that the -- the race, our race dies immediately from degeneracy if this is allowed.

It is an American, who in 1872, in the Journal of Anthropology, published at that time in Washington by the government, laid down this very important and very simple rule, that incest was not an arbitrary command -- I mean, the forbid- -- the -- the taboo of incest. But it was the only way in which human beings could survive, that they would have succumbed to enemies in their weakness, because the race goes down immediately. One of my horses was not changed in time, and so he married his mother, and the -- the horse from this alliance, which nobody had wanted, was two hands smaller than in an ordinary mating process would have happened.

So language has very much to do with the fundamental situation of mankind, that he must know to whom he may make love, and to whom he shall not. Now that's very serious. And I wanted to bring out today at least this one thing, before going onto the linguistics -- problem of the ling- -- so-called linguistic schools today, that our own existence is dependent on our speaking to the person he loves in a n- -- a renewal of language. Nobody ever asks how language is rejuvenated. Well, where there is life, there is death. We are only alive because life begets corpses, and then -- one day you all will be dead, and will be a corpse. And the coward doesn't face this. He subscribes to the -- cemetery of The Beloved and is im- -- declared immortal there. As I heard, myself, saying in Califor- -- Los Angeles, in this fantastic city, you see: "By the virtue of the -- by virtue of the powers vested in me," said the man with the Zylinder, "I hereby declare you to be immortal." The corpse doesn't answer, of course. And -- .

And there you have the modern situation of linguistics. Words have lost their meaning, words have lost their power, if such a criminal fool can stand up and say, "By virtue" -- "By virtue"--ach, this word--"By virtue of the powers vested in me by the trustees of this cemetery, I herewith declare you to be immortal." Then an all-time low of human infamy has been reached. And that happens in the beautiful state of California.

Gentlemen, there is no time in the world that is as profound as this time. It's an end to all speech, to all honesty, to all { } of speech. It's really { }. Lingo takes the liberty of saying, "I define my terms." He is -- such -- this man defines his terms in terms of his { }. He'll pay for it; why shouldn't he say it? There is no re- -- other relation to his sentence and the man himself except his money belt. It's utter nonsense. And yet this goes on. Day after day. We have all the pieces of art, you know, Raphael imitated, Michelangelo imitated, { } imitated. Everything is imitated. Resurrection imitated.

This is very serious. Because that goes on under your noses. I have not seen any student demonstrations against this.

But we are -- the race is dishonored by these { }. We are. Whether it's by advertising, or whether this -- it's -- this -- this kills language. And I assure you--I'm quite serious--the greatest danger that is in the -- ahead of us, in the times to come, is the dying out of faithful, sincere language which has the power to penetrate, to make alliances, so that people are married for good. { } for a hundred years, this country has not made peace between North and South. This country has not made peace, after 1914 to '18, in World War I, with the enemy. It has not made peace in 1945. It cannot make peace. Peacemaking is just not in the power of the United States, because they think peace is an act of the will. I assure you, gentlemen, the language is much more profound and ladies -- know it anyway. Peace is not an act of the will, but is finally, to get inspired and give up her will, then there can be peace in the house.

That is, peace cannot be willed. But the common language of mankind; the peaceful, loving language; the affectionate language overcomes us as a surprise. We didn't know the moment before that we would be able to unite with the other person. We were quarreling -- we were at all -- we were not in accord. But then it happened. And the final word, the redeeming phrase is found under which people can rest in peace.

Our political scientists--I hope there is nobody here who can { } me--our political scientists never mention this fact that peacemaking is not an act of human will. It's an admission that is too difficult to be made. It has to be found. Just as any common language between a -- the Taming of the Shrew is a very true story. The shrew has to be tamed. And { } until finally she doesn't protest when he says that he loves her. Before, she spits and -- and -- and was very angry with him.

This is so simple that nobody ever mentions these great facts of language, that in every generation, every couple renews the human language by its power to appropriate the language as it is spoken. There is never any problem in these linguistic books how it comes, that in every generation, there is again speech. They say it's just inherited. It is not inherited. That's absolutely untrue. It has to be learned. and you have to shake off the empty phrases which your parents have dinned into you, but you didn't understand. And you have to find at least one expression. Perhaps { } endearing name for your sweetheart, which nobody else understands. And as soon as you have made this progress, taken this one step into reality, that you name your girl with a name nobody ever uses for her, then you can say that you begin to speak. Before, it's just babble, all.

Now the tragedy of course of linguistics is in this, today. If you open any book -- here I brought any number of them. One is Russian, and one is American--always the same. There is no difference. You see, they -- we are the socialist

country; they are a capitalistic country. No difference.

Names have lost their meaning. This is certainly true about all economics. I mean -- the Russians, they are very envious of our spoken {medicine}.

Well, here are great lists in both books, the Russian and the American. Functional View of Language, is one called, and the other is called, Exact Methods in Linguistic Research. I've never read more {nonsense}, because they cannot distinguish serious language and talk.

Now out of the loquaciousness of a child, and a teacher, and -- a student, you just babble and talk, and entertain each other, and converse. And in the language of the law, we have once for all, murder is penalized by the death -- capital punishment. There is a tremendous gap. The linguistics lump this together, and say, "That's all { }"

Anything that is said once forever is in a -- quite a different category from these babbling noises which we make and call speech. Talk is not speech. Anything you can handle and retract, and say, "Oh, I didn't mean it," and it -- say it differently, you see, and so { } better understand, all these detours and byways of speech are not speech in the full sense of the word.

To list at least two dif- -- two frequency { } for language is to miss the whole point that as in nature, there is a tremendous waste, a thousand flowers blossom, and one bears fruit, so it is with sentences. You say something, and you say something else. But when this one sentence is allowed to stand out for the ages, that's usually connected with some martyrdom, as in Lincoln's case. He belonged to the ages when he was mar- -- a martyr for the cause. Before, many people were -- were doing something for the liberation of the slaves. And that's not too much, you know. Not against real estate.

And therefore, { }. And half of the people emancipa- -- -pating the blacks in the South didn't mean -- emancipating them- -- themselves. Just read the news from Philadelphia the other day, about this -- Negro electrician he was; gave up his living in the white neighborhood. In Philadelphia, town of Benjamin Franklin.

So they didn't me- -- don't mean what they say. They say they are for equality; they are of course for civil rights; they of course were white -- equality of whites and blacks. All the people in Phil- -- Pen- -- Pennsylvania, you can't find anyone who sides with Governor Wallace. Only in their acts they do. In their acts they side with the -- Governor Wallace. All their words therefore are blown-up water { }. They are worth nothing. They are not words spoken, but

they are words talked. And as long as you do not learn this distinction between talking and speaking, the danger remains that we un-learn to speak.

This is very, very {parsimonious}, very {rare}. If I look back in my -- in my life, I would only count those moments of -- as speech where I was in danger of life, where I said something which was true and important, although it could have cost me my existence. These are the things you do not forget. And you have to say them.

That -- there it begins to dawn on you that any frequen- -- list of frequency of how often "and" is used, and when you are pardoned, are utterly unimportant as long as you do not know when they are seriously spoken, and when they are just said as a filler. For filling in, of course, we talk innumerable sentences. And we would be very surprised if we would be taken up on them.

I once had a very sad occur- -- experience. I gave two talks about the Civilian Conservation Corps, { } the Peace Corps. That's 25 years ago -- 26 years ago. And I invited -- since I encharged by the president of the United States, of the training of the people in the Civilian Conservation Corps, I invited the commissioner of education in Washington. Now not in the state of Washington but in the real Washington, you know. And he came. I { }. I'm very astounded by it. I don't know why he came, but obviously he was -- thinking that there was a plot on foot to -- to criticize him. It was not a plot, but we did criticize him.

And I was asked to say what we could make them do, what they could make us think. { } there were two topics. And I -- insisted that as -- now, with the anti-poverty program, it was important that these down-and-out people, { } poor, and the unemployed, {youngsters}, that they had opportunity to speak to somebody who was not down-and-out, and that you could not amass camps of 200 unemployed, or 50 poor. And hope for any result, but that the relation had to be one to one; one successful, one arriving; and the other, down and out. That may work; that may encourage both -- the -- the successful one to know that it's purely accidental that he was successful, and the poor and out, that there was hope for him, because somebody else loves him who is on the other side of the fence.

And as long as we -- our economic opportunity program does not {lead in} this way, there will be no lasting success. And they don't know it. Our social workers have all read -- read the wrong linguistics. They think if you treat the 50 down-and-out people anything can be {achieved}. Language is, however, always { }. But it means always that two people in different positions agree on something.

And as long as this fight against poverty is put on the level of social workers, and {the sociology} department, then nothing will happen. { } quite the contrary. { } will { } and throw it out again. And that's probably going to happen. Because the people just have neither the will, nor the imagination, nor the patience to demand that the work they do and the risk every one of us takes upon himself, be it -- be a godfather -- being -- becoming the godfather of the down-and-out. As long as you amass the poor, they remain -- the poor, they become even poorer. Fifty poor are much less able to be helped than one. Obvious.

{ }, you see that we live however in a day of statistics. And if you prove that there are 2,000 poor in this town, then the first idea is: help the 2,000. Aren't they? You cannot, as long as you label them statistically, economically, sociologically as the 2,000 poor. Only if they can consider themselves, every one of them, as a friend of a friend of a friend, or -- in three different classes of the community will he begin to -- not himself to be thought of, and to consider himself as a poor. And then he will have received a new name in his own Fan- -- imagination, and in the imagination of his neighbors.

And here comes now the barrier to linguistics: as long as a poor doesn't receive a new name in which "poverty" is not mentioned, the whole program is utter nonsense. As long as he is helped as a poor, he cannot be helped. Because language is categorical and dogmatic. Because I dare this man, myself, and people call me by my name and I know that I'm called by my name, and { }. A poor man is so called behind his back, and that's most degrading. They don't tell him to -- in -- to his face, that he belongs to the poor. Well, -- just as little as they don't say to the black man, if he's black. Oh, they don't say this; isn't polite, you see. Now anybody who is polite, lies.

Politeness is not a condition of speech. That's only true for the { }. Politeness is { }, because we don't know how much this man is wedded to his truth. He has not banked his life on this polite { }. He only wants to evade the issue. He's polite.

This is -- { }. Any peacetime society in this affluence as we are in, in this deep, alleged peace, is of course full of politenesses, you see. But this is just the danger point. That's no speech anymore. That's talk.

The essence of speech is that the name which I carry in my own consciousness, the son of my father and the son of my mother, a citizen of the United States as I am now, and before I was a citizen of Germany --. But I am a professor perhaps--I learned to be quite negligent on this {line} -- {I've had}. I've had so many professorships I don't care anymore, because under the name of

"professor" there -- a multitude of sins is hidden today. Yes, it is. I was very proud { } as a young man, { }, I was the youngest professor in Germany. But that doesn't help. Doesn't help at all. Titles are very {negligent}.

But you have to learn that the people behind your back have one way of speaking of you. The people to your face have another way of talking to you. And you have an opinion of yourself and you hope one day there will be agreement between these three attitudes of people. That's your biography. Some people die in such a way that you learn that what the community thinks of them is the ultimate truth. And what they have thought of themselves is untrue, that they are no good. That happens. But the other way is better. If you can convince the community that not only what they say to your face--that you are a -- a great, grand character--but what they say behind you behind your back is identical with what in your own humility you feel is right about yourself. That hasn't to be any megalomania; that hasn't to be any pride. You can think very simply of yourself --. The harmony between these three circles of speech in your inner mind with the people you meet and who talk to you, and the people as they meet in your absence: these three circles are the problem of human speech. { } they harmonize, then there is peace. If they disintegrate, { } grow farther and farther away from each other, more contradictory all the time, you see, there is war. And when you see that in Saigon, the people demonstrate against the United States, you may well tremble. They are { }. That's terrible. It has tremendous consequences.

This is the ruin of language. There is no more language between even us and the South Vietnamese. I don't know what to say about it. I only can tell you that this is enough to make you weep.

Because language has nothing to do with the frequency of the use -- end of the word "better," or the word "{gun}," or the word "black," or the word "white." But it has to do with the relationship between the word and the man who utters it. Is he willing to be killed for this word, or is he not? That's what the decision the people in Germany had to make under Hitler. And tens of thousands were slain.

And when I said, in 1933 at Harvard University, when I was asked, "Who would resist to Hitler?" and I said, "There may all told a hundred thousand souls who will stand upright and prepare to die instead of following this creature from the abyss."

You know what happened, in this sophisticated place of Harvard which at that time counted the years by 19- -- 1910 instead of 1933? They just had not lived through the First World War, as little as you have. And so they were very

desperate indeed. And they are today.

For this reason. They have not suffered. And so they said to me with a laugh, "Is that all? A hundred thousand people? That's not very much."

Now you know, a hundred thousand martyrs are more than the Christian Church in all our history has ever seen. It's immense. And the 7,000, which I mentioned before, were all killed in the one -- six months from August to February 194- -- '44-45. And therefore the character of Germany was changed, because there were martyrs. And you now don't have to remember Germany as under Hitler, as deprived of noble souls. They represent the -- the -- the prime of Germany and the { } much more than the { }. But you still admire Hitler. I know many Americans who still swear by Hitler. Good Americans. You wouldn't believe it.

What is the reason? Because they have un-learned the distinction between true words, words spoken with their whole existence, and their whole character at the risk of life, and the other.

And I began to tell you the story of my commissioner of education in Washington, D.C. And {we learned} that he's not of {Washington, Washington}. But what did happen? The man listened to my wonderful speech, and I took him to my home, and gave him something to drink. I'm still quite angry that I did. {It makes me nervous}. Because what did he say?

He said, "You are absolutely right." I made this point, not one soul, you see, not 50 together or a hundred down-and-out people, but { } students, and { } other people { }.

And he said, "You are absolutely right. But if you quote me on this, I shall deny it."

Now for a commissioner of education, that's quite a big order, don't you think? But you -- he said in my own house to me, "If you quote me on this, I shall deny it." I mean, quote him on my -- dissatisfaction with my speech, and where I was absolutely right.

That's a wonderful example of what is called "{good} politics." You can also call it "lying." And you can also tell it -- call it the "poisoning of the well." And we are in the midst of the poisoning of the well, that you know from nobody: does he mean it, or does he not mean it? Can he be quoted? { } -- as a com- -- as a commissioner of education that he -- I was right, but that if I quoted him on this, I -- he would deny it, this -- are such an unscrupulous -- I can't tell

you. { }.

He didn't -- hadn't to say anything. But if you said anything about the righteousness or -- falsehood of my statement, he could not add that he would deny this -- his own truth. -- For a commissioner of education, well, that's the education of commissioning.

But we live in this world, in which nine-tenths of the people think that a -- a good lie is { }. And for this reason, you must understand, that frequency tells us nothing about speech. How often some lie is used, but that doesn't improve the lie. Whether a word is true comes only, you see, out of his -- the relation of -- to the speaker to what he says. If we cannot make a dent in the -- in the identity of a man's word, and a man's life, then that's speech. And wherever you can find an opening, a gap, and drive a wedge between what he says, and what he does, and what he is, and what he thinks, that's babble. And that is not speech.

And you cannot learn of -- about the character of speaking anything from those examples, like statistics, because these scoundrels all imitates the one true, and only honest speech. They are very anxious that you are -- they are not trapped. They all -- want to make you believe that they tell the truth. And this is why you can't use the example. Imitation of -- of a diamond, you see, you cannot use to explain a diamond.

And since nine-tenths of the public utterances of mankind--in our newspapers, in our books, in our novels--are written for sale, for acclamation, for electoral votes, they imitate true speech. And because they imitate it, they are not fit to be used in our analysis of human speech. And once you see this, then whole armies of dictionary speech fall down as a perfectly useless for explaining the mystery of our speech. The mystery of our speech can only be learned from these very true and rare cases, where a man has no other way of surviving than this one word. If you want to know how this happened, just read the first -- the speech of the first martyr of the Christian Church, the speech of Stephen.

I always wonder how little -- how little our theologians--who are expected, of course, to write books and to teach--know of the danger of life the first Christians were in when they said anything. There was always stoning ahead of them, or the gallows, or the Crucifixion. And therefore, every word in the Gospel is so interesting, because it was cut out of them in -- in the wildest necessity. They had -- would have preferred to say nothing, because they knew that the gallows were right there.

And so any such utterance had a terrific consequence. When Stephen was stoned, the first martyr of the Christian Church, immediately Matthew stepped

down and began to write his Gospel, because from the first time that it dawned on these good people that they might all be stoned. They might all be done away with -- so you had to write. The writing of the Gospel is one -- a very miraculous story. And of course no theologian has ever thought of it, that it was so interesting, because it was so dangerous. And they only -- wrote finally in danger of life, because it would have -- been worse if, without their written testimony, they all would have been wiped out. In order to -- there was a -- two evils, you see. And that's why we re- -- still to this day read the Gospel because there you can study words that have consequences, and words that were not -- spoken by a commissioner of education, "If you quote me on this, I shall deny it." Peter wanted to deny his -- the Lord, didn't he? He did it twice. But then he saw it couldn't be done. So he was, as you know, crucified head down.

Now I mean this. You see, the word in the Gospel of St. John is written against the linguistics of the modern world as much as of their day. There were plenty of linguistics. There was a great debate on foot in the days of Jesus between Philo, the Jew, and the school of Alexandria where Philo lived. The -- here are the seven liberal arts. Are they the right background for the human soul, for the Enlightenment, and for the -- the bliss of man? Or do you have -- to go to philosophy { } Philo? Philo was { } to go to the {Bible}. The debate was very large, and today it is the same.

We also have, {as} you don't know it, an institution, so-called, the liberal arts college. I understand that you even find yourself in one of them. If this is so, I would wonder if you know what the liberal arts college stands for? The liberal arts college stands for the seven arts of antiquity, which are this side of religion, and this side of revelation, and this side of speaking with conviction. And that's why they are so dangerous; and that's why so many people {love them}. The -- there is -- this is a case in which nobody is taken up for his convictions, in which you can learn of everybody else's convictions, because then you can read the most wonderful books, from Homer to Shakespeare, to Camus, and you haven't to say anything about it. You just enjoy it, as we call it, that you have an intellectual curiosity. It's the most vicious word ever invented by human speech. I have no intellectual curiosity, I hope, because I would be ashamed if I had it.

So it's like a -- { } of a woman. Life is full of teachers. But every teacher that comes today, they aren't allowed to know it. But to act from curiosity, gentlemen, that doesn't give you an education. That's a wrong application of words, and of sentences, and of reading. Curiosity is too cheap. That's good for 4-yearold children, but not for people who already have re- -- every reason { } to be ashamed of themselves, and to respect other people's {secrets}. But the curious man, you see, denies that secrets are sacred. Otherwise he would distinguish between the things he is already allowed to know, as they grow upon him, as he

does something for them, as he serves his { }--his girl--and he {presents} her with his own affection, then she will speak. Then she will open up. But curiosity? { } -- when you read in the papers always these criminals who say they just for curiosity, they tried to -- to find out about the reaction of the woman or somebody else, whom they frighten, or whom they -- whom they rob, or whom they tie, or whatever they do --. This country is quite { } by assuming that curiosity has any decency. It is not. If it is applied to ants, and cells, it does no harm. It can lead to a -- to a scientific study. But if you apply it to human beings, beware of the man who says he's curious to know you. Just tell him that you are not interested.

This is one of the great diseases of our time, that in the { } schools and educational processes, the -- mere curiosity is rated as the same thing as an education, which is done in the degree of maturing, of ripeness. It's all -- as it says in Hamlet, one thing at a time. You cannot know from your { } but we may know when the time has come in -- at which we shall know and must know. Knowledge is a necessity if it comes in its proper day. And it is horrid if it comes because a boy has an IQ of 150, and like the Loeb brothers in Chicago, then kills their best friend, because it's so interesting. They are so curious to know how such a murdered child reacts. Don't think that this is such a long time ago. It's only 40 years ago.

The -- one of them, as you know, was only freed two years ago. The great case of Doc- -- Mr. {Darrow}, as you may know. He got them from the gallows. This is curiosity, and it's one of the devils of today.

The seven liberal arts are quite innocent if they are not { } curiosity. And let me tell you who they are. One art was astronomy, one was music, one was geometry, one was arithmetic. And they are the quadrivium, the first four liberal arts. And they had all been baptized and christened by the -- modern sciences. Arithmetic and geometry, since the days of D‚scartes and Copernicus, have reached { } freed them completely from the purely practical and egocentric sciences of antiquity. And if you look at physics today and music, and you think of Einstein and Beethoven, you know that they are worthy partners of the Christian era. They are inside Christianity. This is not true of grammar. You teach grammar in the same manner as it has been taught in Alexandria 200 years before Christ. And that is an abomination. And that has to come to an end. This is a pre-Christian science, to this date.

And in order to prove it to you, I'd like to spend -- can you give me more -- some more time? { }. I'm curious.

The modern grammarian has not been able to free himself from the impli-

cations of grammar in the pre-Christian period. And I'm very much concerned to prove to you tomorrow that grammar too has to enter the last 2,000 years of Christian -- the Christian era, and is, so to speak, waiting at the gates at this moment, and hasn't made its surrender to the spirit of Christianity. It is not so difficult to -- to prove this. It has always been felt by pious people in the last thousand years that grammar was a pagan science. There's an example which -- on which I may hang up my thesis. Back in 1179--that's in the days of the third Crusade, when the world was hungry already for unity as much as it is now, and the people went to Constantinople, and to Jerusalem to unite all Christendom and even the whole world--there was a monk in Paris -- on the Left Bank, where the University of Paris was, just sprawling and beginning to grow. And I myself have {scented} the oldest commencement address ever given in the West, in that year, 1179 or 1180. I found this manuscript, so it's very dear to my heart, this period, in which all the rules of the game of a liberal arts college were invented. And where suddenly enabled the youth of Europe to study without becoming a monks. You could go to university after that, you see, and study the liberal arts. And then become a lawyer, or a physician, or whatever you wanted to become. And before, practically for several hundred years, all the learned studies there limited to monastic orders. And there were no { } and no knights who could do this.

Well, in 1179, this began, 1180, on the Left -- Bank on the River Seine in Paris, where to this day Le Quartier Latin dominates the imagination. The Latin -- Quarter that is the quarter of the students. And there lies on the Left Bank of the Seine River has made epoch, and you still nourish yourself with the same principles of a liberal arts education.

But what about grammar? Oh, they were very interested in logic, and they were very interested in arithmetic, and all the other arts. And -- of grammar, however, the leading spirit of the time had made so much use that the monks -- { } one of the {sacred} monasteries in the Quartier Latin of Paris, explained, "Grammar has given this man over to the devil."

Now I would say of the communistic, and enlightened literature on linguistics today. Their blind trust in the pre-Christian grammar has led them astray and made out of grammar something statistical, something in the dictionary, something of -- the defining of their own terms, something arbitrary. And the worst in the life of the Holy Spirit is arbitrariness. I can tell you one thing: if there is a Holy Spirit, He doesn't know one thing: to be arbitrary. He { } the necessary. And if He doesn't this, He wouldn't be the Holy Spirit. To be holy means to be unable to spend and to waste his God-given life on prattle, on -- on statistics or what have you. And that { } language not to confuse--this is the important thing--the important and the unimportant.

I -- say this. I was in love with linguistics all my life. I studied them since I was 12 years old. I composed a dictionary when I was 14. I composed all kind of biographies of linguists. I only say this in self-defense so that you must not know that I speak of this as though I was not a converted sinner. Language has been the -- the nourishment of my whole life. And so I really think that I should warn you; I know what I'm talking about. As the state of affairs is now, out of the beautiful term "philology," which at least implies a love of speech, "philo" means to love something; and "logy" is the logos, speech. We have now made "linguistics," which shows that they are totally indifferent to what they say. It is something you can handle as { }. And it's so terrifying. You cannot speak of language without awe. Because any moment you can lie, any moment you can { }, any moment you can {betray} somebody. To speak is a very dangerous performance. It's like dealing with high electrical {sparks}. And I see how these linguistics -- linguists dabble with speech, as though it was just something like plumbing. Now even plumbing, I mean, { } out of the cold water comes the hot water is not very { }. And so plumbing is a serious business. But { } is much more serious. In one sentence, you can insult one-half of mankind.

And {we do}. All these linguists think that the listener is less important than the speaker. And -- I shall end on this note, in order to prepare my way for tomorrow with one now already famous example of the arrogance of the linguist to exclude all the people who do not define their terms, all the people who simply listen and obey. Obedience is something unknown in Am- -- in linguistics in American education. And it is the beginning of wisdom. But a man who -- or a woman who has not obeyed, are {naked}. They don't know what truth is. The first way in which we learn the truth is obedience. There is no other way. And if you don't teach the children to obey, they don't know what truth is. Because they must learn the magic of all speech by being forced, compelled to obey. And they'll never forget this, and they'll apply it to their children. And woe to these children if they don't {obey}. Then they'll say, "Yes, I didn't obey, but you should."

{ }. Obedience is the first form in which you come to know language...

[tape interruption]

...for that's very unfashionable in this country, I know, where the people talk so much that they think talking is speaking. I assure you, talking is not speaking. And all the demonstrators in Berkeley will not convince me, that they speak. They talk. That's not the same.

Now 20 years ago -- 30 years ago, there was a conference of the most learned linguists of France and the -- { } the {romance} languages. But it

would -- could have happened to Slawistik { } the Germanic languages, just the same. And they tried to define an imperative. And what is an imperative?

Well, that's -- as you know, something that has to obeyed. We only say, "Come," because we think the person should come. And if the person comes, then he says, "Here I am," the sentence is completed. So any important command is only ended when the -- a recipient says, "Here I am." It was a great example of {Indian} grammarians, who were better than the Greeks, who say, "When is a sentence is complete? When the father has said, 'Children, go into the woods, break the twig.' Then { } something {more completed}, which the father has said." You know? { }.

When the children come back and stand before their father and say, "This twig is broken." That -- that completes the sentence. And thereby you see the electric current, you see, that circles between these people. He says, "Go into the woods and break the twig." Two hours later, they come back; the twig is broken; the sentence can go to Heaven. It's now, you see, ready to be {felt}. Before, it was hanging in the air, suspended. { }.

Now this venerable linguist probably had a white beard, said, "The first -- let me use a first example { }. First person, { }, or "May I die." The second: "Die." The third, "Let him die." The other -- the fourth: "Let he -- let us die." The second -- the fifth, "You die." And the last, "Let them die."

Have you ever heard such nonsense? He called these -- all these five sentences -- all imperative. {One is the root}; the other is a possibility. There is only one real imperative, and it's "Die," you see. And then comes the act; probably by which either a man commits suicide, takes his dagger and kills himself, or is killed by somebody else. Now this seems to me quite serious. I have nothing to teach this man. or these gentlemen. They are the leading -- the leading masters of philology, {Bruno, Galli}--some of you may have seen their work and know their books. They are very learned people, but they are { }.

Well, most scholars -- scholars are constantly in great danger, you see. An electrician is in danger of { }. And a scientist is in danger of -- losing his mind. I'm quite serious. This is always overlooked and { }. Most of my friends { }. { }.

Well, { }?

A Dutchman got up at this -- meeting in 1948. And a { }, and said, "I don't know. An imperative is a sentence that waits for its -- its hearer, its obedient hearer. If I say, 'Come,' and there is nobody who hears me say this and

responds, my {imperative} is not completed." The imperative waits for the man who accepts this command as directed towards me -- towards him. And only the man who responds completes the subject of the imperative sentence.

Now many of you who have studied languages will very well know that in all languages the imperative is a { } form, a form which does not express the present -- the present. "Ama" in Latin is just the root of the word "amare." The same, of course, in English, and in German, and in French, and in Italian. It is the shortest form of the verb, and it waits to be filled with the response of the listener, "I did it." whatever that is. And in this moment, where it -- comes a decent person allows the speaker to feel that he's recognized with his command, as legitimate, the sentence is finished. Just as in the sentence, "Break the twig," the sentence is finished when this -- the children come back and say, "The twig has been broken." In the same manner, we all -- when you give an order to your child, the order is only perfect, perfected, complete, perfected if the child comes and says, "Yes, Mama, what can I do?" That's the minimum. { } done exactly what the command implies.

Now this is unknown. It has not penetrated { } of the wisdom of the { } of the seven liberal arts, gentlemen. And I had to wonder, when I read this report of the getting together in the -- in the scientific -- at the Academy of Science in Amsterdam, at the Dutch { } -- that it took a Dutchman in his dry -- dry -- such a dry manner to discover that the six imperatives, allegedly, "May I die," "Die," "Let him die," that they are mixing all the metaphors. The imperative is only when I say something and hope for somebody to do it. That's an imperative. You see, I am {waiting} for the person who will undergo my treatment and will accept it {if, as directed towards me}.

Now the Lingo of Linguistics consists in just that: { } they have never been able to free the single sentence out of its alleged isolation. But they analyze sentences, paragraphs, you see, as though they stood by themselves. But they allow the second person, be it the wife to whom you declare your love and affection, be it the friend with whom you lined up { }, be it a -- a -- executioner or judge { }, you see, in judgment over the criminal. They should have never allowed the { }. Grammar to this day is a purely pagan activity. Paganism means that man is alone. If you isolate a speaker, so that he -- his sentences too are analyzed as though he was alone, {grammar} goes mad, people go mad, and this I think is the direct outcome of the {style} of the linguistic science.