example of Wilkins's charmingly arbitrary and absurd categorization scheme. In the thesaurus I thought it might be under organic matter, but instead I found it listed under class two > subclass IV > sub-subclass D > 311. Which is to say, space > motion > motion with reference to direction > excretion. Here, too, “shit” is classed under directional motion. Arbitrary? Yes. Absurd? Perhaps. But also—importantly—useful.
Usefulness is all the thesaurus demands of its classification system. It should be useful to someone who is trying to find a word. It should group words with other words in a way that will help a person locate the one that most accurately expresses a particular meaning.
But it does not need to explain that meaning. It assumes you already know it (when this assumption fails, a thesaurus can be a dangerous thing, as anyone who has ever graded a freshmanessay can attest). The classification is useful, but not definitive. What you come away with at the end of a session with a thesaurus is not a meaning but a word, a plain old imprecise English word. It means whatever it means because, well, that's what English speakers generally use it to mean. At the end of the day, shit is not an excretory downward motion; shit is that thing we mean when we say “shit.”
Wilkins's classification, on the other hand,
was
meant to be definitive. You use it to produce not an English word but a universal word. A word that bypasses messy human languages and gets right to the concept. Shit is not “shit” but
cepuhws
. And
cepuhws
is … Well, perhaps it's time for me to restore a little dignity to the discussion here.
This demand for conceptual precision makes Wilkins's language very hard to use. Before you can say anything, you have to know exactly what you mean to say. I never realized what an imprecise word “clear” was until I tried to translate it into Wilkins's concepts. I learned that what I meant to say was “manifest” (or rather
bebuhw
), and for that I give him credit. He did an impressive job of unpacking and analyzing the many senses of the words. But I couldn't imagine carrying on a conversation using these unpacked senses. If the word “clear” is imprecise, it is mercifully so. And not necessarily to the detriment of meaning. “It is clear that…” carries with it a bit of transparent glass, the bright ring of a bell, a sunny day, a candid conversation, an uncluttered table.
Bebuhw
has left these senses separately imprisoned in their own categories, and it seems the poorer for it.
My translation of the rest of the words proceeded along the same lines of my “clear” experience: muddled confusion punctuated by flashes of insight. A few words lent themselves to an easy translation (“universe”—“the compages or frame of the whole creation”), but most of them were as difficult as “clear.” The more I worked on “arbitrary,” “reason,” and “simple,” the more slippery and ungraspable they became.
Once I had decided where each word was placed in the tables, I had to figure out how to pronounce it. This should have been straightforward—each category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory provides a sound or syllable—and it would have been, if not for the addition of all sorts of complications. You have to add syllables or change letters depending on whether you want the noun or the adjective, and whether it's active, passive, plural, and so on.
Bebuhw
, for example, must be changed into
vebuhw
if you want the adjective “manifest” (rather than the verb “is manifesting”).
Language, after all, is more than just a bag of words. The words have to be put together into sentences, and we need a way to keep track of what roles the words play in sentences—we need things like suffixes, prepositions, or word-order rules to tell us how the individual words are contributing to the big picture. Wilkins (unlike some of his modern successors) was quite aware of this, but his ideas on
Usefulness is all the thesaurus demands of its classification system. It should be useful to someone who is trying to find a word. It should group words with other words in a way that will help a person locate the one that most accurately expresses a particular meaning.
But it does not need to explain that meaning. It assumes you already know it (when this assumption fails, a thesaurus can be a dangerous thing, as anyone who has ever graded a freshmanessay can attest). The classification is useful, but not definitive. What you come away with at the end of a session with a thesaurus is not a meaning but a word, a plain old imprecise English word. It means whatever it means because, well, that's what English speakers generally use it to mean. At the end of the day, shit is not an excretory downward motion; shit is that thing we mean when we say “shit.”
Wilkins's classification, on the other hand,
was
meant to be definitive. You use it to produce not an English word but a universal word. A word that bypasses messy human languages and gets right to the concept. Shit is not “shit” but
cepuhws
. And
cepuhws
is … Well, perhaps it's time for me to restore a little dignity to the discussion here.
This demand for conceptual precision makes Wilkins's language very hard to use. Before you can say anything, you have to know exactly what you mean to say. I never realized what an imprecise word “clear” was until I tried to translate it into Wilkins's concepts. I learned that what I meant to say was “manifest” (or rather
bebuhw
), and for that I give him credit. He did an impressive job of unpacking and analyzing the many senses of the words. But I couldn't imagine carrying on a conversation using these unpacked senses. If the word “clear” is imprecise, it is mercifully so. And not necessarily to the detriment of meaning. “It is clear that…” carries with it a bit of transparent glass, the bright ring of a bell, a sunny day, a candid conversation, an uncluttered table.
Bebuhw
has left these senses separately imprisoned in their own categories, and it seems the poorer for it.
My translation of the rest of the words proceeded along the same lines of my “clear” experience: muddled confusion punctuated by flashes of insight. A few words lent themselves to an easy translation (“universe”—“the compages or frame of the whole creation”), but most of them were as difficult as “clear.” The more I worked on “arbitrary,” “reason,” and “simple,” the more slippery and ungraspable they became.
Once I had decided where each word was placed in the tables, I had to figure out how to pronounce it. This should have been straightforward—each category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory provides a sound or syllable—and it would have been, if not for the addition of all sorts of complications. You have to add syllables or change letters depending on whether you want the noun or the adjective, and whether it's active, passive, plural, and so on.
Bebuhw
, for example, must be changed into
vebuhw
if you want the adjective “manifest” (rather than the verb “is manifesting”).
Language, after all, is more than just a bag of words. The words have to be put together into sentences, and we need a way to keep track of what roles the words play in sentences—we need things like suffixes, prepositions, or word-order rules to tell us how the individual words are contributing to the big picture. Wilkins (unlike some of his modern successors) was quite aware of this, but his ideas on
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