The Extraordinary in the Ordinary by Crosby Donald A.;

Author:Crosby, Donald A.; [Crosby, Donald A.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438464596
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Speech and Speaking

We are sometimes inclined to think of language as a kind of fixed and finished implement, something like a hammer or saw that can be put to use in a variety of ways but that does not itself change in any significant way. This is the conventional, established language of published grammar books and dictionaries. We can call it speech. Here we have what Polanyi refers to as “assimilation of experience by a fixed interpretive framework.” But there are also the ongoing and inevitable acts of making use of a language, the acts of each and every person as he or she speaks or writes in the medium of a given language. We can call these acts the acts of speaking. These acts involve more than mere assimilation. There is now, again in Polanyi’s words, “the adaptation of such a [linguistic] framework to comprise the lessons of a new experience.”10 Speech, in the form of an established language with its vocabulary, syntax, and conventional usages, is more or less fixed, while speaking is dynamic, changing, and creative. Speaking can also over time be destructive of some of the traditional terms, rules, and forms of speech.

We need not confine the term speech, used in this more technical sense, to oral uses of language. It also applies to the acts of writing. And it applies to linguistically assisted acts of thinking and imagining. Speaking is thus language’s cutting edge, its continuing adaptations to new experiences, insights, and situations. It imparts to language a dynamic, ever-changing character. Words can be used in new ways that may at first seem idiosyncratic but that over time can become customary and familiar. New words and phrases can be invented for new problems, situations, or systems of thought. Syntactical rules and conventions may be altered in ways that grammarians initially consider flagrantly wrong and vehemently criticize, but that in time come to be widely—if sometimes reluctantly—accepted.

Innovations may be introduced into language with speaking or implementations of it that are at first excitingly novel and insightful, but that come with frequent use to be ordinary and unnoticeable. Ongoing acts of speaking make language a living thing rather than an inert instrument. In different contexts, over different times, and with multitudes of different users with different backgrounds, needs, goals, and imaginations, language can become more precise, more loose and evocative, more creative, or more adaptable to different undertakings. Existing languages provide contexts necessary for both conventional and novel communication and thinking.

As Polanyi points out, existing languages also tacitly express, convey, and contain many of the dominant commitments, assumptions, beliefs, and conceptions regarding the nature of things that characterize particular cultures.11 To progressively learn and use a native language from childhood to adulthood is thus to experience a kind of deep-lying, generally unconscious acculturation. But personal acts of speaking enable each of us to escape being merely trapped in a culture or an array of unrecognized cultural assumptions and to contribute to a culture’s continuing change and development—its needed adaptations to evolving circumstances and times.

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