Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (21 page)

We have no need to delve into the subtleties that underlie such choices. Just as it is not our aim to explain how people distinguish among
studies, studios, offices, dens, ateliers, cubicles
, and
workplaces
, or among their friends who are
agitated, antsy, anxious, apprehensive, concerned, disquieted, distressed, disturbed, fidgety, frantic, frazzled, frenetic, frenzied, jittery, nervous, perturbed, preoccupied, troubled, uneasy, upset
, or
worried
, or between situations calling for “Thanks a million”, “Thank you ever so much”, “Many thanks”, and other expressions of gratitude, so it is not our aim to explain the nature of the nuances that lead a person to choose to say “however” rather than “but” or “nonetheless” or “actually” or “and yet” or “that having been said” or “despite all that”. We are concerned not with pinpointing the forces that push for choosing one or the other of these linguistic labels, but simply with the fact that each of these different phrases is the name of a subtly different mental category — a highly characteristic, oft-recurring type of pattern in discourse space to which one can draw analogies.

We might point out here that where English has two most basic conjunctions (“and” and “but”), Russian has three —
(“and”), “
HO
” (“but”), and “a” (whose meaning floats somewhere between “and” and “but”). This means that Russian speakers and English speakers have slightly different category systems concerning very basic, extremely frequent phenomena that take place in discourse space. Picking up the subtleties of when to use “a” instead of
or “
HO
” takes a long time. It’s much the same story as for any set of categories that overlap. We don’t want to give a linguistics lesson, so we’ll stop here, but the bottom line is that words that to most people seem
infinitely far from the most venerable and clichéd examples of categories (such as
chair, bird
, and
fruit)
are nonetheless the names of categories, and they are so for the very same reasons, and the categories they name act very much the same.

It might seem logical for a chapter on words to move from the most frequent ones to rarer ones, but we will go against expectations here. We want to finish up by talking about some of the most frequent words of all, which, like “and” and “but”, are almost never thought of as being the names of categories. Consider words like “very”, “one”, and “too”, for instance. What category does “very” name? Of course we can’t literally point to members of the
very
category the way we can point to members of the category dog, say. Still, let’s try for a moment. Usain Bolt is a very fast runner. Cairo is a very big city. Neutrinos, they are very small. That’s very
you.
There; that’s enough to give the feeling. Much like
much, very
is a category having to do with norms built up over a lifetime of prior experience. Where Rome is a big city, Cairo is a
very
big city.

We learn to use the word “very” just as we learn to use the word “much” — by hearing examples of its usage and feeling our way around in the world of sentence construction. Does the fact that the crux of the notion
very
has to do with the formation of sentences disqualify it from being a concept? No, not at all. The concept
very
is just as genuine a concept as is
dog.
The concept
very
is all about relative magnitudes, expectations, importances, intensities. All of that is deeply conceptual.

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that Albert Einstein was one very smart dude. Yes, no doubt about it, Einstein was
one
smart dude, as opposed to being
several
smart dudes; but why was he not just
a
smart dude? The word “one” can convey more information, it seems, than just the number of items that somebody is talking about. In this case, saying “one smart dude” emphasizes the extreme rarity of a genius of Einstein’s caliber; it is a subtle way of squeezing extra information into the sentence via a very unexpected channel. However, the choice of the word “one”, as opposed to the word “a”, also conveys information about the persona of the speaker (earnest, candid) as well as about the tenor of the conversation (informal, casual). Moreover, using the word “dude” strongly resonates with using the word “one”, and vice versa — indeed, when used together, these two words paint a vivid portrait not only of Albert Einstein but of a certain brand of English speakers who are prone to use this kind of phrase.

To put it more explicitly, probably most native speakers of American English have developed a category in their minds that could be labeled “the kind of person who goes around saying ‘one smart dude’ ”. However, the category is not as narrow as this label suggests. To be sure, it would be instantly evoked if one were to hear the above remark about Albert Einstein’s intelligence, but its evocation doesn’t depend on having heard the specific words “smart” and “dude”; it would also be evoked by remarks like “Doris Day was one cute cookie” or “That’s one bright lamp!” We thus see that even bland little words like the numeral “one” intoned in a certain fashion, which might seem very close to content-free, can evoke rich and subtle categories in our minds.

Having just considered “one”, let’s move along to “too”. Of course that word has two quite separate meanings — namely, “also” and “overly much” — so let’s focus on just the latter. What are some quintessential members of the
too
category? Well, perhaps the idea that eating a whole fudge cake would be too much. Or the idea that teaching general relativity to elementary-school kids would be too early. We’ll let readers invent their own
too
situations. The point is that doing this little exercise will make it vivid for you that there are analogies linking each
too
situation to other
too
situations, and thus to the abstract concept of
too
-ness.

When we considered the concept
much
, we pointed out that part of its richness is how it is used in sentences. Indeed, the realm of discourse is one of the richest domains we humans come into contact with. Just as there are concepts aplenty in the worlds of linear algebra, molecular biology, tennis-playing, and poetry, so there are concepts galore in the worlds of discourse, language, grammar, and so forth, but we seldom think about them. Thus a high-school student might pen a poem in flawless amphibrachic hexameter without ever suspecting that there is a standard name for such a meter. Likewise, we native speakers of English are all past masters in the use of words such as “the” and “a” without ever analyzing how they work. But the Polish linguist Henryk Kałuża wrote a whole book —
The Articles in English
— to teach non-native speakers “the ins and outs” (one of his examples of “the”) of our language’s definite and indefinite articles. As it turns out, Kałuża’s book is all about the
meanings
of these rich words, but nonetheless, some people resist the idea that “the” and “a” have meanings, arguing that they are not “content words” but just grammatical devices. It seems that since these words do not designate tangible objects, some people think they are devoid of meaning (not unlike people who insisted for centuries that zero isn’t a number). It seems strange, however, to suggest that the difference between “the president” and “a president” has nothing to do with
meaning.
There is a great deal of content conveyed by the distinction between “the sun’s third planet” and “a sun’s third planet”, between “I married the man in the photo” and “I married a man in a photo”, between “the survivor died” and “a survivor died”.

Trying to pin down how words like “the” and “a” are used in English is not our purpose here — no more than trying to specify the type of circumstances likely to evoke the word “office” as opposed to the word “study”. What we are emphasizing is that this subtle knowledge is picked up over many years thanks to one analogical extension after another, usually carried out without the slightest awareness of the act.

And thus we have moved our discussion from fairly low-frequency words, like “hub”, “attic”, and “moon”, to the very top of pile — the most frequent word in all of English — the definite article “the”. In so doing, we have also moved from very visual, concrete phenomena to phenomena that are largely intangible and mental. But what’s crucial is that in making this move, we have never left the world of categories. Just as “hub” denotes a category (or perhaps a couple of different categories — the centers of bike wheels as opposed to certain major airports), so “the” denotes a category (or perhaps a few distinct ones, as the world-class “the”-expert Henryk Kałuża would be quick to point out).

Any language has an immense repository of labels of categories that people over millennia have found useful, and as we grow up and then pass through adulthood, each of us absorbs, mostly by osmosis, a decent fraction of that repository, though far from all of it. The many thousands of categories that we are handed for free and that we welcome, seemingly effortlessly, into our minds tend to strike us, once we have internalized them, as self-evident givens about the world we live in. The way we carve the world up with words and phrases seems to us
the right way
to view the universe — and yet it is a cliché that each language slices up the world in its own idiosyncratic manner, so that the set of categories handed to speakers of English does not coincide with the set handed to speakers of French, or to those of any other language. In short, “the right way” to see the world depends on where and how one grew up.

A striking example is provided by English and Indonesian. The English words “brother” and “sister” seem to us anglophones to cover the notion of
siblinghood
excellently, as well as to break that concept apart at its obvious natural seams. However, the Indonesian words “kakak” and “adik” also cover the notion of
siblinghood
excellently, but they break it into two subconcepts along an entirely different axis from that of sex: that of age. Thus “kakak” means “elder sibling” while “adik” means “younger sibling”. To speakers of Indonesian, this seems the
natural
way to slice up the world; they don’t feel a need to be able to say “sister” using just one word any more than anglophones feel a need to be able to say “older sibling” using just one word. It doesn’t cross their minds that something is
missing
from their language. Of course Indonesian speakers can say “female kakak or adik”, and that effectively means “sister”, just as we English speakers can say “older brother or sister”, and that effectively means “kakak”. Each language can express through a
phrase
what the other language expresses through a
word.
And the French language does an admirably diplomatic job with these concepts, managing to slice the world up in both ways. The male/female dichotomy tends to be the more frequently used one in French (“frère” vs. “sœur”), but the older/younger one exists just as well (“aîné” vs. “cadet”), and thus all possibilities are available. As this shows, slicing the world up at its “natural” joints is not quite so natural as one might think.