Orwell & Hayakawa

Before reading Hayakawa, Orwell had fully convinced me that "linguistical determinism" does exist: namely, that language shapes thought and the words you know directly influence the corresponding thoughts. As I wrote before, Orwell seems to believe that the word is the thing and that if one can control the words, one can control the thoughts (hence Newspeak). This seems to be the opposite of what Hayakawa believes: symbols (words) are not intrinsically linked to what they represent. Does anyone else believe that Orwell and Hayakawa differ?

However, after reading Hayakawa and all of your responses, I'm beginning to revise my view. Meg's explanation of the "quack" sound helped clear up some of my confusion, although I had meant to type this in my previous post: "All right, so the word is not the thing as the different versions of "quack" in different languages show."

I believe that some concepts are almost impossible to express clearly without the use of symbols, such as patriotism. But as Hayakawa writes, the specific symbols themselves do not necessarily have a connection to what they are representing, as fireworks and apple pie do not have an inherent link to patriotism. But over time, due to people's perceptions, perhaps fireworks and apple pie have gained a pseudo-connection to patriotism? I know that bicycle tires and computer mice could just as easily stand for patriotism if we wanted to switch symbols, but the fact is that they currently don't. And if you attempted to replace the current symbols of patriotism (flags, stars, etc.) that have persisted over hundreds of years with arbitrarily decided ones the next day, I'm not sure that these new symbols would be as powerful as the previous ones. Maybe fireworks and pie did not originally have any intrinsic or fundamental connection to what they represent, but over time they might have developed a link based upon people's perceptions.
But once again, I'm not sure. I'm kind of in a transition stage between Orwell's thoughts and Hayakawa's. Oh, and Mary, I'm actually not sure if we disagree, as I'm still trying to reconcile the differences in opinion between Orwell and Hayakawa.

Moving on from Orwell, I thought that Hayakawa's explanation of the creation of a dictionary was fascinating. I thought that editors had arbitrarily created definitions or revised previous ones. It adds a new perspective to learn that the editors derived all of the meanings from actual pieces of writing and real cases of context and usage.

It seems as though dictionaries are at least somewhat fluid, moving with the times. But if Hayakawa's description is correct, how would dictionaries gain new words that are primarily used in conversation? For example, there are slang words, words recently created like "truthiness" and "frenemy." They haven't had enough time to pass into literature, so perhaps dictionaries must always remain a step or two behind the modern lexicon?

Finally, when I read about Hayakawa's explanation that "circumstances compel...[people]...to agree" upon certain conventions (like the number of days in a week or the names of months), I immediately thought of the French Revolutionary period, where the week was revised to contain 10 days and the eleventh month was renamed Thermidor. Shaking up these commonly agreed conventions certainly was revolutionary, and in the end a bit too revolutionary. The French to eventually revert back, as "circumstances compelled them to agree" eventually. Just a random tidbit that jumped to my mind.


Thoughts?
(Eric Wei)