Wordplayed

Alice meets brothers Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee in her adventures Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll

by John Tenniel (1820-1914) This image is in the Public Domain {{PD-US-expired}}  

Increasingly in recent days, elected representatives in the United States are obliged to hold "town halls" or other meetings with constituents, many of whom object to the apparently arbitrary harm being inflicted on Americans and the world. 

The broadcasted video clips of these meetings illustrate the anger and determination of voters now united across party affiliations, as well as the seeming surprise among representatives that their own comments in response are often met with doubt, ridicule, or worse.   

At an extraordinary time in this country, people are standing up for efforts to blunt, block, or dismantle what seem to be arbitrary excesses. As events unfold, in addition to better known resources to help deal with political language, what initially seems an unlikely resource to keep perspective is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. [1] 

Yes, Carroll's writing is intended for children. Nonetheless, as the linguist Marina Yaguello notes "Alice is clearly a competent communicator but the various creatures she encounters... challenge premises upon which her competence is founded, above all the rules of polite conversation. [2] Mostly, those creatures bluster or bluff their authority over language, Alice, and just about anyone or anything else. 

To deal with the contrariness of the White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, Queen of Hearts, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, or many more, Alice politely questions the assumptions in their assertions. She chooses her words carefully to consider, concede, or correct comments.

When Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, he insists a word means just what he chooses "it to mean–neither more nor less." [3] At first glance, this is a topsy-turvy thought. But words do have only the meanings readers or listeners give them. We generously interpret a variety of meanings from words. And during conversations in small groups or between two people, we "seek a fair estimate of what the other person said and has in mind." [4] 

Within large gatherings of people, especially crowds or mobs, it's gossip, rumor, and contagions of irrationality, panic, violence, and other extremes that often drive emotions and action. In gatherings or on the media, tribes of politicians, pundits, and "influencers" vie for attention, continuously repeating catch-cry words well past their use-by date. Through continuous repetition, the words are dissociated from reality, with many becoming quite meaningless. Yet as we recognize with music and poetry, it is sounds that particularly stimulate feelings and emotions.

As Yaguello notes, "Where proverbs, slogans and aphorisms are concerned, the 'tune' (that is the phonic, rhythmic and syntactic structure) is at least as important as the 'lyrics' (the words)." [5] And when we give in our language "...priority to pure sound, we leave the way open to meaninglessness, the absence of meaning, as distinct from nonsense... Words... no longer have any designs on reality. [6]

Such wordplay drives the recurring talk of wannabe influencers on broadcast media. For example, the obsession of contemporary media with oft-repeated reports of discord, disturbance, and disorder drumbeat fracture and cacophony. The effect among otherwise reasonable listeners and readers is to propagate widely feelings of threat, disconnection, or even "a decline of community." [7]  Moreover, some researchers suggest this abuse with negative information "creates conditions for effective manipulative influence." [8]

In addition, many public figures recklessly negate effective communication, by trying to influence us with recurrent talk about "finding the right message" to push their position on us. These inanities insultingly infer we listeners are passive vessels yearning for their wisdom. Is it still such a radical thought for public figures to genuinely listen to people?

George Orwell alerted in the 1940s that "political language... is designed... to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." [9] He offered six "rules" to counter "humbug and vagueness generally." [10] And before this, he had warned about manipulations of language that the pigs employed to take control of Animal Farm. [11] Soon afterwards, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he detailed principles that his fabricated Ministry of Truth incorporates in Newspeak to control "mental habits" and make "all other modes of thought impossible." [12]

Orwell concedes people in his time seemed little bothered to do much about such abuse. Yet he was still optimist enough to think that the "ugly and inaccurate" was reversible. [13] 

Logic clearly isn't enough. Anyone committed only to logical argument in the emotional swill of contemporary public discourse best recognize and find ways to deliver the "potent, pervasive, predictable" [14] role of emotions as drivers of decision. Sure, reasonable, rational debate may emotionally engage folks who are committed to pursuing logical proof, [15] but isn't it time to get real about how recent events land in the hearts and minds of so many in the community?

What more will you do to make truths real?

References

1. Lewis Carroll (n.d.), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Through the Looking-Glass and Other Writings, New York: Peebles Press [1st published 1871]

2. Marina Yaguello (1998), Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, p. 110

3. Carroll, p. 205

4. Noam Chomsky (1993), Language and Thought, Kingston, RI: Moyer Bell, p. 21

5. Yaguello, p. 88

6. Yaguello, p. 94

7. Sergei Samoilenko (2025), "The Tricksters of Permanent Liminality," in Samoilenko, Sergei A. and Solon Simmons (Eds.), The Handbook of Social and Political Conflict, New York, Wiley,         https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119895534.ch23

8. Т.Е. Бауліна і В.Ю. Крикун “ДУМСКРОЛІНГ ЯК ЯВИЩЕ СУЧАСНОГО МЕДІАПРОСТОРУ” Актуальні проблеми філософії та соціології УДК 1:16(161) 9-14, DOI https://doi.org/10.32782/apfs.v049.2024.2 [T.E. Baulina and V. Yu. Krykun (2024), "Doomscrolling as a Phenomenon of the Modern Media Space,” Current Problems of Philosophy and Sociology, UDC 1:16(161) 9-14, DOI https://doi.org/10.32782/apfs.v049.2024.2 : via Google Translation]

9. George Orwell (1981), "Politics and the English Language," A Collection of Essays, Orlando, FL: Harcourt, p. 171 [1st published 1946]

10. Orwell (1981), p. 170

11. George Orwell (1977), Animal Farm, New York: Signet [1st published 1945]

12. George Orwell (1972), "The Principles of Newspeak," Nineteen Eighty-Four, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 241-251 [1st published 1949]; see Word to the Wise blog (2024), May 27, Common Cause,    https://communicator.rodney-miller.com/2024/05/common-cause.html

13. Orwell (1981), pp. 156-157

14. Jennifer Lerner, Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karim S. Kassam (2015), "Emotion and Decision Making," The Annual Review of Psychology, 22 September, 66: 799-823, DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043

15. Rodney G. Miller (2022), Australians Speak Out: Persuasive Language Styles, Albany, NY: Parula, p. 74

Omission

Ernest Hemingway, c. 1939

by Lloyd Arnold. This image is in the Public Domain {{PD-US-not renewed}}

"Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with magnificent lavishness. He keeps his words to their short path," writes American humorist and short-story writer Dorothy Parker in 1927.[1] Whatever one thinks of Ernest Hemingway's passions or actions in life, his writing can express feelings that reach into people's hearts.

His short-story "Hills Like White Elephants"[2] is a "delicate and tragic"[3] dialogue between a "young couple...arguing about whether the girl should or should not do something. The something is not immediately clear."[4] Each expresses feelings about an "operation," but the then taboo word abortion is omitted. Details of their age or relationship are also omitted.

From the opening words, "The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white," sparse details set the scene for the interaction between an "American and the girl with him," while they wait for a train. They are seated at a table outside a bar. Soon enough, their small talk about the hills or choice of drinks cannot gloss over the tensions between them.

The reader has only the turn-taking dialogue between the couple to infer how each feels about the "operation." And the successive, tense negotiations over what's "reasonable," or "natural," or being "happy" or "fine" all seem inadequate to bridge some deeper disagreement. The reader must experience the differing emotional nuances embedded in the dialogue to interpret the misalignments of the people.

In this way, Hemingway crafts real people having difficulty finding accommodation with each other. He once remarked that "The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings."[5] He felt that:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above the water.[6]

He coined the term for this approach as the ice-berg theory, or theory of omission.[7] This was a new way of writing at a time when the stories published would extensively describe locales and the character's actions, emotions, facial expression, or other features.

As Hemingway noted, "not a damn critic thought anything of [this short-story] when it came out."[8] The former Columbia University scholar Lionel Trilling observes that when Hemingway: 

...first began to write and his stories were being steadily refused by the magazines, they were returned "with notes of rejection that would never call them stories but always anecdotes [or] sketches." One of these early stories was "Hills Like White Elephants."[9] 

The story was stimulated by realities that Hemingway and his friends talked about "One night in Rapollo...and the cruelty of the law which did not allow young unmarried women to avoid having an unwanted child."[10] Yet much power of the story comes from his omitting details of description, explanation, or argument, to craft a powerful expression of feelings.

Through Hemingway's "unerring sense of selection,"[11] we are able to experience the interaction between the people. Our feelings are engaged.

References

1. Dorothy Parker (1927), "Constant Reader," New Yorker, 3 (29 October), pp. 92-94, in Robert W. Trogdon (Ed.), Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference, New York: Carol and Graf, p. 88

2. Ernest Hemingway (1987), "Hills Like White Elephants," in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons/Macmillan, pp. 211-214 [first published 1927]

3. Parker, p. 88

4. Robert McAlmon (1938), Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography, London: Secker and Warburg, pp. 155-159, in Trogdon, p. 25

5.  Ivan Kashkan (1935), "Ernest Hemingway: A Tragedy of Craftsmanship," International Literature, No. 5, May, pp. 72-90, in Trogdon, p. 166; see also, Elizabeth Levin (2013), "In Their Time: The Riddle Behind the Epistolary Friendship between Ernest Hemingway and Ivan Kashkin," The Hemingway Review, 32(2), pp. 95-108, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265952710_In_Their_Time_The_Riddle_Behind_the_Epistolary_Friendship_between_Ernest_Hemingway_and_Ivan_Kashkin

6. Ernest Hemingway (1932), Death in the Afternoon, New York: Scribners, pp. 191-192, in Trogdon, p. 125

7. Paul Smith (1983), "Hemingway's Early Manuscripts: The Theory and Practice of Omission," Journal of Modern Literature, 10(2), Indiana University Press, pp. 268-288

8. Ernest Hemingway (1933),  Letter to publisher Scribners, in Matthew J. Broccoli (Ed.), with assistance of Robert W. Trogdon (1996), The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway / Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925-1947, New York: Scribner, pp. 202-204, in Trogdon, p. 145

9. Lionel Trilling (1967), The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries, Fiction, NewYork: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 305-306

10. McAlmon, in Trogdon, p. 25

11. Parker, p. 88