Abstract: The empirical rationalization of the nursery jingle has never, I think, fully convinced an insulted child. The child who lives in all of us persists in feeling that names can probably hurt quite äs much äs stones. Since the dawn of Speech man has regarded his unique faculty with a concentrated and religious ambivalence of fear and reverence, and his use of words has alternately been extolled äs the highest enlightenment and denounced äs the basest deceit. Both sides in this argument acknowledge the enormous power of language but differ in their evaluations of it. Another sort of argument, often advanced by scientists and artists, takes the despairing view that language has no real power at all. Words, in their view, cannot penetrate the hidden structure of matter, nor adequately reproduce the labyrinthine richness of experience. Both kinds of argument, however — the normative and the utilitarian — have been with us at least since Plato scorned the rhetoric of Gorgias. And the attitudes they articulate have been with us longer still, since the first prayer or curse — the first effort to control a force by a word, and the first fear that it might not work.

Abstract: Not saying what you mean and not meaning what you say are, by common consent, deplorable defects in any language user. It might seem an even more deplorable defect in a language to provide usages which, at least on a simple-minded view, oblige us to say other than what we might be taken to mean, or to mean other that what we might be taken to have said. But that is constantly what natural languages do, and it is one of the hazards of using them. Now this may be a lamentable state of affairs; but it would be even more lamentable f or linguistic theory to try to pretend that it was not so. Pretence can take many forms. In linguistics, äs elsewhere, subtler forms of deception may thrive where grosser forms are declared intolerable. So it may be äs well to begin by presenting an unmistakably crude and quite hypothetical version of the particular misconception to be discussed in what follows.

Abstract: The critic may use the work äs a starting-point for his exposition or may centre his exegesis on the text itself. If the former his Interpretation of the text precedes his critical account, if the latter his study of the text will bring to bear that Information which he chooses äs relevant to his purposes. In both cases the critic must make explicit the effect which the text has on him. His account may imply rather than state, but his understanding of the way in which the text works must be a stage in the composition of his critique.