DANGERS OF CATCHWORDS

Taranaki Daily News, 8 July 1929, Page 13

DANGERS OF CATCHWORDS

TERMS THAT ATTRACT US DICTIONARY of familiar words HOW TO TELL A PROCRASTINATOR. In our hurried lives tvc are too apt to allow words to bluff us. We are attract-' ed by catchwords that we hear impressive people use, and often we do not really understand what they mean. Someone tells us “there was no organic disease, only a functional disorder,” and, being rather pleased at the contrast, we use it as often as we can, for years without ever clearly knowing what it means. We hug to ourselves obscure terms “congenital,” freedom,” “progress,” and “reversion”; we roll under our tongue as sweet morsels really difficult phrases like “the survival of the fittest” and “the struggle for existence”; we overwork some ° words like “evolution,” and “instinctive” and “value,” using them in three or four different ways. Herbert Spencer was one of the biggest-brained men of his time, yet Professor Karl Pearson convicts him of using the word “force” in five different senses. If such things are true of a green tree, what may we not expect of a dry one? But a way of escape is to be found in a clarifying book by Paul D. Hugon, “Our Minds and Our Motives: A Dictionary of Human Behaviour.” WHAT IS “ZEITGEIST”? There is much to be said for a dictionary when we get into the mire. We can consult it behind a newspaper and rejoin the intellectual conversation all illumined. Ordinary dictionaries are too succinct and treatises on human nature are too prolix, but Hugon’s compact “Dictionary of Human Behaviour” gives us instantaneously just what we need to know as intellectual combatants. When our adversary says: “Yes, but what do you mean by ‘Acquired Characters,’ ‘Behaviourism,’ ‘Cause,’ ‘Determinism,’ ‘Extraversion,’ ‘Free Will,’ ‘Genius,’ ‘Heredity,’ ‘lnstinct,’ ‘Judgment,’ ‘Karma,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Mind,’ Noumpnon,’ ‘Personality,’ ‘Quality,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘Sociology,’ ‘Telepathy,’ ‘The Unconscious,’ ‘Variation,’ .‘Will,’ ‘Xenia,’ ‘Yoga,’ and ‘Zeitgeist.’?”—Why, we have only to look up Hugon’s Dictionary. We cannot be expected to keep in our head all the things we have just mentioned, and we cannot carry about an Encyclopaedia; but here we have a compact vade-mecum, which might even be published like a diary in an Indian paper vest pocket edition. How intellectual conversation would then hum! How deft one would become in sub rosa turning up “Relativity,” “a Complex,” “Mendelism,” “Monism,” “Libido,” and all that sort of thing that one reads up before the Debating Society, and forgets next day! THE AR.T OF KISSING. Did not one of the great poets speak of holding the universe in the palm of our hand? That is what we feel as w r e handle Hugon’s Dictionary, which is really a marvel. It s and clear and broad-minded. Its brevity is often the soul of wit, and where the author did not feel very sure of his ground he was frank enough to give a quotation from some expert. Thus, in regard to “Kissing,” he quotes Maptegazza’s flowery words: “The lips are the rosy frontier on which the inner and outer natures meet and exchange their emanations.” It sounds a trifle unhygienic, somehow, but that, we suppose, is what the reality is. Of course, there have been Dictionaries of Philosophy for years and years, but they told us what they thought was good for us rather than what we wished to know. Our brave author, who has such power of vivid presentation that we are not surprised to notice that the writer is from Hollywood, telle us what we w r ish to know —all about our psychic insides for instance.

KINESTHESIA AND KLEPTOMANIA.

Although he is very philosophical, which means looking at things in an allround. way (synoptically, as the pundits phrase it), he takes a wide sweep with his act, and tells us about adolescence, balance of character, cajolery, dreams, endocrines, fortune - telling, ghosts, hunch (this quite new to us, we are not ashamed to confess), impatience (this more familiar), the James-Lange theory (which comes under “J”), kinesthesia, and kleptomania, lying (a fascinating and wise article on a much misunderstood art), mental healing, numerology (which has nothing to do with the theory of numbers, a wellknown gymnasium for highbrow mathematicians), opportunism (of diplomacy), personal equation, quickness of mind (which might have had a cross reference to 1.Q., another entry welcomely new to us, purporting to mean “Intelligence quotient”), rejuvenation, salesmanship, and in the very next article the very different quality of “sans-gene,” sex and sleep and spiritualism, trance and trichotomy and truth, unconscious mind, visualising, -womanliness, and so forth. A dictionary makes good reading, though a little staccato, and this one is full of bons mote. Thus “good advertising is the active association of one’s goods with an acquisitive complex already existing at the unconscious level, and a definite avoidance of all association which can entail resistance.” “Wonder is expressed by fixed attention without rigidity, eyes wide open, mouth relaxed and slightly open.” “The most certain and rapid identification of the procrastinator is through his handwriting: failure to cross t’s from left to right is an infallible sign of thia habit, being an unconscious symbol of incomplete action.” “As a

means of listening-in on one’s unconscious reactions the ouija board is sometimes of value.” “Fanaticism, enthusiasm at the service of hatred.” ARE WE PROGRESSING? We are attracted to this P’ctionary because it is a competent expression of science and philosophy hand in hand, and because it is a new instance of one of the progressive features of our time — the increasing availability of the intellectual social heritage. With this there is associated, we think, an increase in the average capacity for utilising this heritage. The intellectual giants of to-day have no greater stature than, say, Eudoxus and Archimedes, but there is considerable evidence in support of the conclusion that the average stature has risen, especially in the direction of being able to profit by the social heritage. And so w r e are commending this Dictionary of our minds and motives, because it is a definite aid towards man’s perennial need for more resoluteness in his thinking. It deals with terms and phrases that we are continually bandying about, too often as catchwords. If we agree with Mr. Hugon’s terse explications of them, then the greatest service of the book will be fulfilled if our dissent prompts us to make better oneg for ourselves. —'Professor J. Arthur Thomson in “John o’ London’s Weekly.”