Oxford University Press
has recently published scholarly editions of two books by William Empson
(1906-1984): Some Versions of Pastoral
first published in 1935 and now running to 496 pages and £80 in Seamus Perry’s
edition; The Structure of Complex Words,
originally 1951 and now running to 672 pages at £95 in Helen Thaventhiran and
Stefan Collini’s edition. Colin Burrow, Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Oxford, provides a long and informative review of the books in my
London Review of Books 15 July 2021.
But he hasn’t quite persuaded me to place an order.
Empson is reckoned a
major figure in the development of literary studies in England and the USA, a
position achieved despite being expelled from the University of Cambridge for
heterosexual activity (see Wikipedia for details). It is his role in the
development of modern literary studies which justifies these fresh editions,
not his status as persecuted heterosexual. Leaving aside the first book it is
the title of the second, The Structure of
Complex Words, which deters me.
That invites two
questions: (1) What kind/s of structure do words have, if any? (2) Unless the expression Complex Words is a pleonasm, what
distinguishes complex words from the rest?
Words when spoken have
phonetic and phonological features which can be captured by the phonetic
alphabet; when spelt out in an ordinary alphabet some of those features may be
recoverable from the written form but in English not consistently so. So the
pronunciation differences between single-syllable hat and hate are
indicated by application of a rule which extends to other cases: fat and fate, mat and mate, pat and pate, rat and rate … Unfortunately, there is also bait as well as bate, gait
as well as gate. And at the outer limits of
English orthography, sound and spelling
are entirely separated, notably in the case of proper names of which the
stand-out (and meant to be stand-out) is Featherstonehaugh:
the idea here is that only if you mix in the right circles will you know how to
pronounce it. So whatever structure
there is, it is not built out of Lego blocks which retain their shape wherever
inserted.
If hat and hate are simple,
are hatful and hateful complex? Well, they are two-syllabled rather than one; the bolted-on ending - ful adapting them to be ready for adjectival use. That doesn’t sound very complex, and it’s
not hard to grasp. But sometimes the -
ful is not - or is no longer - a purely grammatical indicator. I can look
at the night sky and tell you that I experienced
a moment of awe but if I tell you that I
had an awful day it’s not in the same league of meaning; the - ful downgrades awe to something more
quotidian. Someone learning English as a foreign language might have to have
that explained to them. Indeed, whatever complexity words have out of context of use might best be
understood in terms of the problems they might pose a second language learner. The Oxford English Dictionary is constructed
very much in this spirit though it also has English speakers in mind when it
classifies words as arch., euphem., obs.,
coarse slang. In this way of looking at things, it’s not clear to me that
the complexities of awe and awful are of a different order to those
which surround, say, boat and ship. I don’t believe that the latter
pair could be handled as a “technical” problem, solved by recourse to some measuring system, in a way that awe and awful can’t.
What could be structure
turns out to be a dense mass of sense congealed from a long past of history and
cultural changes. History and culture do not have modular structures, as if atoms
or logical formulae or those Lego bricks. Accurately summarising such history
and culture within the pages of a dictionary is a Sisyphean task because
history is accumulating as you write and culture is changing in new ways
ditto. Dictionaries are just specialised encyclopaedias, and thus necessarily partial. The rules of arithmetic or the periodic table aim to escape partiality and many believe that they can succeed.
But are there other
kinds of complexity? Is hate a
complex word in ways which hat isn’t?
Is onyx simple in a way which honest isn’t?
Speakers and writers are,
for the very large ninety nine point nine percent most part, using words which
have been used before and where there are some fairly general features they
will be understood to possess or imply unless those features are explicitly
cancelled. So if I say She was wearing a
hat that implies (whether I have realised or not) something which may occasionally be cancelled
as it is in She was wearing a hat slung
round her neck and hanging down her back. Ah, you see it now, a straw sun
hat, perhaps? If I say He’s a hateful
fellow that may be partially cancelled by addition of the very convenient but word He’s a hateful fellow but I have to give him credit for ….
This last example
incidentally illustrates another problem for any theory of structure: hateful was once a twin of hatful, since it meant full of hate. But that use is now
reckoned archaic by the OED and hateful
is now roughly synonymous with repugnant -
a hateful person is one who excites hate not someone who exudes it. There is no
logic or necessity requiring this change, any more than there is for the
replacement of reject with refute
or annoy with aggravate. This kind of complexity in
the history of individual words makes the prospect of any general account of their "structure" very remote. It can only be
captured by narratives. The possibility of a more general theory of how to use
words in a particular context is much more promising
as is shown by the world-wide take-up of J L Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) and all that has been developed from
its simple expositions.
A writer needs to be
sensitive to the sense which words
are likely to carry (as it were, directly) and imply (as it were, indirectly).
But it’s also true that since writers cannot control everything they are doing,
some senses will be conveyed and some implications steered towards which they
did not, personally, at the moment of writing, intend. Forensic analysis of
literary texts, under many different names, will be on the look-out for such
senses and implications, perhaps especially if they seem to contradict avowed
intentions which the author has been foolish enough to profess. It’s better to
acknowledge that a lot of the time you ( and me) don’t know exactly what we are
doing and at the very moment when we are trying to bend language to our
purposes the meanings of what we say and what we write exceeds whatever we
intended.
But thinking like this,
what place is there for a special category of complex words? Hat has a
history just as much as hate which is
to say that both have been framed in different ways in different times and
places. It may be fashionable or unfashionable to wear hats; ditto for hating
to which in some times and places cultural prestige may attach so that it is a
compliment to call someone a good hater.
There is a further
problem. Words can be used but they can also be mentioned. Traditionally, there
were words which it was forbidden to use but which it was permitted to mention
- that is to say, to quote. But in my Brave New England Puritan print culture,
there are words which it is regarded as unacceptable either to use or quote.
Thus, when my Prime Minister (in a text message) described his Health Secretary as “totally fucking
hopeless” both print and online versions which supposedly quoted what he said
actually amended it to include asterisks which were not present in the
original. The purpose is the same as that intended by Sunday school rules for
turning Direct Speech into Indirect Speech, rules which miraculously transform
the wine of “He’s totally fucking hopeless” into the water of “The Prime
Minister expressed exasperation with his Health Secretary”. The trouble with
direct speech is that it can be too direct by half and not something you would
want to put on the front pages or allow your maiden aunt to hear. (Maiden aunt is probably now arch. but you can always look it up).
Part of the writer’s
opportunity consists in the ability to make use of this difference between use and mention but sometimes leaving it unclear whether something is being
said or quoted; access to this linguistic resource is central to making the
most of irony which can be administered in larger or smaller doses, according
to taste and malevolence.
Well, if I am led to generate
1500 words just contemplating the title of a book, I think it would be a very
bad idea to try to read its 672 pages and distill them for you here - and Colin Burrow in his helpful review indicates that distillation isn't exactly easy; Empson wasn't that kind of thinker. But perhaps I have done enough to prompt you to fork out for this many-paged, expensive edition of William Empson’s The
Structure of Complex Words.
