Language in Thought and Action

It had been nigh on 50 years since I last read this book in a college linguistics class. That's way too long. I had forgotten how important this book really is.This is a seminal work that explains so much about humanity that it's difficult to describe. Read this book. I can't say much else. If I could give it ten stars here I would. Certainly the best non-fiction book in my library, and I've got a lot of non-fiction. Try to find this edition if you can - comments on Amazon indicated that later editions had been edited for political correctness, which tells me that the editors that did that didn't read the book.

This book is a classic, which first appeared in 1939 and was most recently updated and revised in 1991. Clearly, we are not talking cutting edge here, but this book did introduce the concepts of semantics to many, many readers. I was one of them: this was the first serious book about language that I read, at the age of 10 in 1954, and it triggered an interest that has lasted through my life. First time readers will find ideas in Hayakawa's book -- that language affects what we think and what we do -- that are important and still fresh.

Not what I was expecting, but very interesting and enjoyable reading. How language shapes our thinking and, sometimes, derails our thinking. Something here for the philosopher, the historian, and the linguist.

Although a linguist friend didn't think much of Hayakawa's book, I found it very thought provoking, and therefore meaningful.

My favorite quote from this book wasn’t even by Hayakawa:

"A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an internal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive because of any ethical reason it does not survive because it conforms to certain cannons, or because neglect would kill it. It survived because it is a source of pleasure and because the passionate few can no more neglect it then a bee can neglect a show more flower. The passionate few do not read "the right things" because they are right. That is to put the cart before the horse "the right things" are the right things solely because the passionate few like reading them …"

"Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern Works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time. Modern Works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive Generations semicolon whereas, with Classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative to decide your taste is unformed. It needs guidance and it needs a thority of guidance."
Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It, as quoted by S. I. Hayakawa in Language in Thought & Action, 4th Ed, p 139-140 show less

This is actually a reprint of his famous 1939 book and a world of sociolinguistic research has accrued since then, but this was the pioneering text. It is still interesting and fun to read, but don't stop here. It's a very interesting field.

A classic. I try to read this at least once a year since I first read it in 1998.

I made a review on YouTube

https://youtu.be/ClNhM6lZjWU