In the Beginning was the Word

Abstract

In the early part of the twentieth century, The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company was one of the largest insurance companies in the country, employing scores of accountants, adjusters, and actuaries. It was also home to two great American intellectuals1. The more renowned of the pair was Wallace Stevens. Stevens was a lawyer and a vice president at Hartford, but he stands in the history books as a poet. In 1955, he received the National Book Award for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Less well known, but formidable in his own right, was a fire-prevention specialist at Hartford, Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a chemical engineer; his avocational pursuits included anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. It is for his contributions to linguistics that he is remembered. Whorf, along with Edward Sapir of Yale, developed the theory of linguistic determinism. This theory asserts that the words we use determine—and constrain—the way we think. As Whorf put it, “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages... and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement that... is codified in the patterns of our language.”2 Eskimos, Whorf stated, can have more nuanced thought about snow than non-Eskimos because they have a greater variety of words for the types of snow they encounter. George Orwell, in his novel 1984 , expounded on this idea that language could control thought. In Newspeak, the language developed by The Party, words such as “free” and “equal” were stripped of their original meanings to the point that concepts like political freedom were made to be “literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.”3 Happily, many of the scary notions …