Bit Of Language Research Articles

How To Get About

AbstractThe ‘Only connect!’ that serves as epigraph to Forster's Howards End tolerates a variety of interpretations; but the very idea of a connection, or a relating of one thing with another, is conceptually deep. One form of connection is when something is about a thing, representing or symbolizing that thing. When we think of someone, or discuss something, we connect to them, or to it.In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him? […] Isn't my question like this: “What makes this sentence a sentence that has to do with him?”’ Wittgenstein thus notes the ramifications of his question: what makes her name hers? In virtue of what is this thought about them a thought about them? The issue he highlights has been with us since Plato's Cratylus and its history is unified by a presupposition: whatever makes it that (i) a bit of language (like a name or a sentence or any linguistic symbol) is about something is, fundamentally, also what makes it that (ii) a thought (or idea or image) is about a thing. The story of aboutness will be uniform, simplex, or so the presupposition has it.But the history of the issue has been one of failure: we still don't adequately understand the nature of representation. I will propose and develop a perspective that rejects the presupposition and explains the failure: there is more than one way for a thing to be about something. Representation comes, ultimately, in varieties.

Linguistic concepts are self-generating choice architectures.

While the idea of a 'concept' has been defined in diverse ways, researchers in the cognitive science of language have largely agreed that linguistic concepts are objects, whether mental or physical, that bits of language stand for. This O-axis view (where O = object), focusing on sign-object relations, sees linguistic concepts as ideas that stand in a static relation to signs, with the function of mediating relations between agents and their environments. But this is only half the story. Because every linguistic concept is moored to a bit of language, and bits of language are mostly learned and encountered in sequences of social interaction, then we must look not only at what signs stand for (their objects), but at the interpretants, or rational responses, that they elicit. By focusing on sign-interpretant relations, and thus taking an I-axis view (where I = interpretant), we not only acknowledge the direct link between concepts and social interaction, we also discover causal mechanisms that explain how linguistic concepts are distributed in relatively stable form in populations. We find that while concepts are indeed mental objects, they function as choice architectures in the dynamic flow of situated language usage. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain

Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain Robert Anthony Siegel (bio) “I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.” —Wallace Stevens 1. My mother and I sat listening to our breathing over the phone. If I asked a question, she gave the shortest answer possible, placing the words down with slow exactitude, like a row of coins scrounged from the bottom of her purse. “Did you get out for a walk today?” I asked. “To the fruit stand.” The stand on the corner was the limit of her territory now, the border of her remembered world. Beyond that corner, she couldn’t find her way back. “What did you get?” “Bananas.” She had been an overwhelming talker in the old days, hyperfluent, hungry for attention, unfiltered, exhausting. It was awful, but better than this. “You used to talk more than anyone on the planet,” I said now, trying to sound amused— playacting for myself, not for her. “It was a veritable tsunami of words. You could drown people. You did drown people.” “Now I like to be quiet.” I shifted in my seat, unsure what to do. Silence had always meant anger in our family, but now it just meant silence. For a thing to be so exactly what it was— nothing less and nothing more—it was as if she had somehow stepped outside the cage of language and was standing beside it, peering in. 2 At the time, I was living in a small city in Virginia, in an apartment building by [End Page 52] the railroad tracks. After one of our calls, I would go downstairs and walk beside the freight cars as they dreamed past, like children’s blocks the size of houses, an unthinkable, dark weight sleeping inside them. Here, here, here, they sang, and then gone, gone, gone, and then there was nothing but the sound of my breathing filling the cold street. 3 A part of me recognized that I could give in and let the phone line stand empty between us for a few minutes, that it would hurt no one, that it would be like moonlight in a darkened room. But another part of me became electric with fear and began to talk about anything, everything, trying to fill us up with words. 4 I told my mother about the hike my wife Karen and I took outside of town: the long gravel road, then the path that wound steeply upward through the trees, a sort of green tunnel, and the deer down by the stream at the bottom of the ridge. And when I couldn’t come up with anything more, I finally asked, “And what have you been doing?” “Me? I went hiking on the mountain.” “Mom, you’re in the middle of Manhattan. There is no mountain.” “But I do have a mountain, and I hike there.” For a second, I thought she was making fun of me, and then I wasn’t sure what to think. “There is no mountain on Twenty-third Street,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “If there is no mountain, how do I hike on it?” It was dark and starting to rain, long heavy drops that glowed in the light of the streetlamp below my window. She was filling in the gaps with whatever bits of language she could scavenge from our conversation, trying to cobble together a bridge that could take us from here to there without falling. “Well, I see your point,” I said. “It was a very nice hike,” she replied. 5 Karen and I had walked in silence, breathing hard because the trail was steep. The trees met at their tops to form a sort of latticework roof, and the light filtered down, bluish-green, the color of silence. No sound from the outside; our own footsteps inaudible. The feeling was of enclosure: a winter garden filled with a forest, or maybe a memory box by Joseph Cornell the size of the world. It contained a creek and a little wooden bridge at the bottom of the ravine and then a...

Girdi Hipotezi ve Monitör Modelinin Yetersizliği, Anlaşılabilir Girdilerin Operasyonel Tanımı ve “Edinme” teriminin Yanıltıcı Kullanımı Üzerine Eleştirel Bir İnceleme

ABSTRACT: Stephen Krashen has been one of the prominent figures in the field of second language acquisition. His Input Hypothesis and Monitor Model can be considered as his most noteworthy work. Specifically, his principal proposition that emphasizes the importance of comprehensible input for language acquisition sheds light on linguistic competence. Krashen claimed that languages could be easily acquired as long as the acquirer is provided with natural bits of language. Despite the high acclaim they have received, Krashen’s ideas have also been harshly criticized by certain linguists as his claims failed to clarify certain issues related to the second language acquisition. In this respect, the authors of this paper critically review his Input Hypothesis and Monitor Model focusing on the insufficiency of the input for language acquisition, absence of an operational definition of comprehensible input, and misleading use of the term acquisition. In addition, the authors also adopt a satirical language to pinpoint the aforementioned insufficiencies and misleading components, while supporting their claims with recent empirical studies that were rarely conducted in the field.

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary MarketplacePlagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary MarketplacePlagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

Semantics and the sacred

ABSTRACTThis article looks at four different scholarly perspectives on ‘sacred’ – the ineffable sacred, the experienced sacred, the polarized sacred and the contextualized sacred – in order to draw out their implicit presuppositions about meaning. The first two stances presuppose that meaning depends on what bits of language are about (referentialism), and the other two stances presuppose that meaning depends on relations between bits of language (holism). The article concludes three things: these prominent views of ‘sacred’ rest on usually implicit or unrecognized assumptions about the nature of meaning; some of those assumptions explain why certain theories are contentious and problematic and others ground more promising and productive approaches.

Conceivability and possibility: some dilemmas for Humeans

The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of P at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental representation, then it is easy to show that we can conceive the impossible, for impossibilities can be represented by meaningful bits of language. If the conceivability of P amounts to the pictorial imaginability of a situation verifying P, then the question is whether the imagination at issue works purely qualitatively, that is, only by phenomenological resemblance with the imagined scenario. If so, the range of situations imaginable in this way is too limited to have a significant role in modal epistemology. If not, imagination will involve some arbitrary labeling component, which turns out to be sufficient for imagining the impossible. And if the relevant imagination is neither linguistic nor pictorial, Humeans will appear to resort to some representational magic, until they come up with a theory of a ‘third code’ for mental representations.

A Little Like Reading: Preference, Facebook, and Overwhelmed Interpretations

Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word “prefer” upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?—Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (22-23)His brain was jerking forward likea bad slide projector. Hesaw the doorwaythe house the night the world andon the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing drinking gettinginto a car and Geryon'swhole body formed one arch of a cry—upcast to that custom, the human customof wrong love.—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (75)Like eyes that looked on Wastes—Incredulous of OughtBut Blank—and steady Wilderness—Diversified by Night—Just Infinites of Nought—As far as it could see—So looked the face I looked upon—So looked itself—on Me—I offered it no Help— Because the Cause was Mine—The Misery a CompactAs hopeless—as divine—Neither—would be absolved—Neither would be a QueenWithout the Other—Therefore—We perish—tho' We reign——Emily Dickinson, poem 693Herman Melville, Anne Carson, and Emily Dickinson. These authors' bits of language just claimed me as I stared at some books on my office shelf, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of these passages except that I like them. So I'm listing them for you. You might also like them. I like many things, and in no particular order. For instance, here's what I “liked” one day, not long ago, on Facebook: a picture of the word Puppies! scrawled on a sidewalk; a New York Times story about the disorganization of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 (that war has a huge, nearly comical significance in my adopted country of Canada—did you know that Canadians burned down the White House?); an audio clip of Justin Bieber, featuring Busta Rhymes, singing “Little Drummer Boy”; my friend and colleague Jordan Stein's “vegan homo Thanksgiving” photo album; a posting by my “friend” “Emily Dickinson”; numerous updates about and images of the November 2011 pepper spraying of protesting students on the University of California, Davis, campus. I could go on and on, which is probably one of the reasons I, and millions of others, go on and on Facebook. Disorderly is the right word, but the likes are not quite random. People have generated these items, these virtual objects of interest, for rapid public consumption and, with the ubiquity of the “Like” button, for rapid public response. They (we) put stuff out there in part because we're showing off our preferences, or if not our preferences (even though they will be acknowledged with our liking) then at least things that interest us and (we hope) others. It's hard to know exactly what liking something on Facebook means because a like is nearly the same thing as an acknowledgment, something that says, “Yes, I clicked on this item, and it did not displease me.” And often people complain in comments that they wish there were variations on the “Like” button (“I want to express my anger with this piece of information—I wish there were a ‘Hate’ button”). Whatever our motivations or the nature of our interest in what we curate for the world on Facebook, these objects for consumption often go under the heading of like; so, like it or not, we're reading for like—we're doing a little like reading.

What we see and don’t see when we look at ‘competence’: notes on a god term

‘Competence’ is one of health professional education’s most cherished ideas. It’s what the 20th century rhetorician Kenneth Burke would call a ‘god term’ (Burke 1952): a sort of education idol, an ‘‘expression to which all other expressions are ranked as subordinate’’ (Weaver 1953). This god term presides over many of our conversations in health professions education, conversations including curriculum reform, evaluation systems and program accreditation, to maintenance of certification. And, like other god terms of our era (‘patient safety’ has recently emerged as one, ‘objective assessment’ has long been another), ‘competence’ is a rhetorical trump card, regularly played as the last word in debates about how health professions education should function. To a rhetorician, any bit of language with that kind of power cries out for a closer look. ‘‘Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing’’, as Kenneth Burke asserted (Burke 1935). He drew attention to how words function as ‘‘terministic screens’’: ‘‘even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality, and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality’’ (Burke 1966) (emphasis in original). What aspects of competence are we attending to, and what aspects are we avoiding? What actions and values are made possible by our way of seeing competence in health professions education, and what actions and values are rendered impossible? This editorial presents a preliminary teasing apart of our way of seeing competence, in order to draw critical attention to what the god term invokes and what it elides. In its conventional usage, competence is an individualist notion. The emphasis is on producing and maintaining ‘‘the competent physician’’ whose knowledge and skill is performed and assessed over the course of his or her training and practice. In this regard, the god term reflects the reality of health professional education’s focus on the individual.

The Resurrection of Being in the Ricorso of Finnegans Wake

The Resurrection of Being in the Ricorso of Finnegans Wake Damon Franke (bio) In dreaming, all their sunshine seemed so sad,As though the current of the dark To BeHad flowed, prophetic, through the happy hours. Amy Levy, "Xantippe: A Fragment" In 1917, Lord Ernest Rutherford split the atom and helped usher in the nuclear age. Twenty-two years later, in Finnegans Wake, James Joyce deliberately radicalized the problems of writing by dissecting and rejoining the roots of language and, in the process, added by chance an eventual contribution to physics in coining the neologism "quark" (FW 383.01). Joyce puns on this interdisciplinary parallel in the famous phrase often used to describe the revolutionary style of his last work: "The abnihilisation of the etym" (FW 353.22). The annihilation of the atom becomes, through etymology, a comment on the earliest formation of words out of nothing (in Latin, ab nihil-"from nothing"). Indeed, in discussing the creative style behind the Wake, Joyce suggested that he had composed it "out of nothing."1 If words, or etymons, appear without primordial order and lead to a deconstruction of the divine origin of language, these playful references nevertheless suggest that in the beginning of human speech was a word. Yet even the most cursory forays into the Wake agree that it assaults not only traditional conventions of narration but also the very idea of a founding logos. As if an encore to the virtuoso parody of styles that structures Ulysses, Finnegans Wake is a text in which the multiplicity of languages gobble each other up and churn out a concatenation of neologisms, nonsense, and nuanced profundities. To recoup a sense of the depth of style, narration, and effect of the Wake remains an unfinished scholarly task, one that may, among other uncoverings, point to an alternative grammar of Being. Joyce's use of Ur significations of "to be" in the last book of Finnegans Wake suggests that this verb itself is inflected in any logos. By tracing Joyce's repetitive, proximate insertions of the Indo European root for "to be," "*es-," I will show how this linguistic style corresponds to a philosophy that intrinsically links language and Being. Through Joyce's puns and relentless collocation of es morphemes, [End Page 115] the verbal high jinks of the ricorso use the smallest bits of language to elaborate an ontological concept. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, I argue here that Joyce similarly questions Being to perform a new grammar for beings.2 In effect, the ricorso is an etymological allegory that subversively comments on one of its central themes, resurrection, by implying that Being is a continuous present defined by close relationships among individuals. As Book III of the Wake winds down and dawn approaches, Johnny MacDougall, the last of the Four Old Men, now inscribed as a bedpost, proceeds to offer his perspective on the bedroom of HCE and ALP. The "[f]ourth position of solution" that he presents indicates some possible discord with the three synoptic positions-"How johnny!" (FW 590.22-23, 23). With the advent of Book IV or the ricorso, the work-long parallel between the Wake and the four Gospels begins to finish its cycle of commentary on the themes of death and resurrection. In an assortment of varying pagan, Christian, and linguistic forms, resurrection lies at the center of Book IV. Hugh Kenner states that Book IV "corresponds, in ways too obvious to require enumeration, to the Resurrection at the climax of the Lenten sequence, and to the Last Gospel (John I) at the close of the mass proper."3 On the other hand, James S. Atherton, in commenting on the numerous travesties Joyce makes of the liturgy, undercuts an orthodox interpretation of the Wake by reminding us of the "many quotations that would have to be ignored by anyone claiming to prove that Joyce was a devout Catholic treating the Mass with respect."4 When the Wake was written and when Kenner was drawing his parallels between the mass service and Joyce's last work, a priest recited the Last Gospel at the close of the liturgy as...

Linguistic Understanding and Belief

In a recent paper, Dean Pettit (2002) argues against the view that understanding a bit of language consists in the possession of propositional knowledge of its meaning-what he labels the epistemic view of linguistic understanding.' His objection to the epistemic view is that it entails that it is necessary to understand a bit of language that one possess propositional knowledge of its meaning, but this necessity claim is false: for linguistic understanding, unlike knowledge, does not fail in Gettier cases, does not require epistemic warrant, and does not require belief; in supplying cases demonstrating this, one supplies cases of linguistic understanding without such knowledge. Pettit's arguments, if successful, thus establish the falsity of a variety of weaker claims in addition to that of the epistemic view. They would establish, for example, the falsity of necessity claims as weak as the weakest modality allowing the possibility of his cases. Further, the third argument-that linguistic understanding does not require belief that the bit of language means such-and-such-establishes, if successful, the falsity of parallel claims concerning belief. Given the case Pettit appeals to in his third argument, this would include the falsity of the claim that belief about an expression's meaning is nomologically necessary for a human speaker to possess linguistic understanding of it. Pettit's case thus poses a challenge to prominent empirical accounts of semantic competence that advert to states with such propositional content.

Lockean and logical truth conditions

1. In ‘A problem for expressivism’ Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit argue ‘that expressivists do not have a persuasive story to tell about how ethical sentences can express attitudes without reporting them and, in particular, without being true or false’ (1998: 240). Briefly: expressivists say that ethical sentences serve to express non-cognitive attitudes, but that these sentences do not report non-cognitive attitudes. The view that ethical sentences do report non-cognitive attitudes is not Expressivism (and not non-cognitivism), but rather a version of cognitivism. According to (what we’ll call) Subjectivism, a typical ethical sentence like ‘Abortion is wrong’ reports the speaker’s non-cognitive attitude toward abortion; it says, in effect, that abortion is the object of some attitude of the speaker’s. Expressivists, by contrast, say that the sentence expresses a non-cognitive attitude toward abortion, but does not say that the speaker has it. Ayer put it this way: I can say that I am bored by uttering the sentence ‘I am bored’, but I can express boredom, without saying that I am bored, by yawning (Ayer 1952: 109). As Jackson and Pettit see it, a certain plausible Lockean story about how sentences come to express beliefs, and so how they come to have truth conditions and truth values, will cast serious doubt on the Expressivist claim that some sentences express attitudes without reporting them. The main Lockean idea starts from the uncontroversial point that bits of language get their meaning from conventions. What conventional facts give a sentence of the form ‘x is square’ its meaning? The fact that we have (implicitly) agreed ‘to use “x is square” as a way of conveying our taking it to be the case that x is square’ (Jackson and Pettit 2003: 86). Distinguish the assertibility conditions of a sentence from its success conditions. (For ordinary declarative sentences, the success conditions will be the truth conditions, but we want to allow the possibility of success conditions for sentences that lack truth conditions.) The conventions that give sentences meanings had better be conventions governing their assertibility

Wittgenstein’s Pragmatic Strain

1. A CENTRAL debate within conversations about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy turns on the significance of what is sometimes called the “pragmatic strain” in his writings. At issue in the debate is Wittgenstein’s tendency to urge philosophers concerned with the meanings of particular linguistic expressions to attend to how those expressions are used. Interpretations of Wittgenstein’s later thought diverge conspicuously over the question of the implications of this pragmatic gesture. What distinguishes many of the more influential interpretations is an understanding of the gesture as expressive of a form of skepticism about our basic logical ideals (such as, for example , truth, objectivity, and rationality.). A number of respected interpretations claim that Wittgenstein’s larger goal in emphasizing ways in which we employ expressions is to suggest both that sentences have meanings and are truth-value candidates in virtue of being embedded in a coherent set of practices and, in addition, that talk about the truth or objective correctness of a sentence is therefore properly conceived as talk—not about whether the sentence does justice to the world, but rather about its bare practical importance. Thus, for instance, according to Richard Rorty’s well-known interpretation, one of the later SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Wittgenstein’s Pragmatic Strain* ALICE CRARY *I would like to thank Jay Bernstein, Nathaniel Hupert, and Sanford Shieh for their helpful suggestions about how to improve this paper. An earlier version was presented at the March 2003 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy in Denver, Colorado, at a panel on “Cavell and the Contested Bounds of the Pragmatic Tradition.” I am grateful to Stanley Cavell for his response, which included a number of useful comments and criticisms. Wittgenstein’s overarching ambitions is to describe a “pure ‘language -game’ view of language” on which “questions about ‘ties to the world’” do not arise (1982: 114), and on which characterizing a bit of language as true or objective is at bottom nothing more than a matter of complimenting it for how well it enables us to “cope” (1982: xix). Despite their prevalence, interpretations that proceed along these lines are far from exegetically unproblematic. The most fundamental challenge they face comes from the fact that Wittgenstein himself never represents his pragmatic emphasis as inconsistent with logical ideals such as truth and objectivity. Although proponents of the interpretations attempt to meet this challenge in various ways (for example, by depicting Wittgenstein as a “quietistic” thinker who is reluctant to fully spell out implications of his pragmatic views)1, the mere fact that they are obliged to confront it provides some incentive to consider the merits of alternative interpretative approaches. And there are in fact a number of insightful and interesting interpretations that qualify as “alternative” in the relevant sense, namely, in that they both accent Wittgenstein’s pragmatic concerns and also represent those concerns as consistent with the preservation of our basic logical ideals.2 In this paper, I want to sketch an interpretation of this alternative variety. My main aim in doing so is not, however, to arbitrate the exegetical debate I have just outlined. A decisive contribution to this debate would require a comprehensive survey of Wittgenstein ’s writings, and I will limit myself here to considering a few passages in which Wittgenstein airs his pragmatic concerns. What I hope to show is that the relevant passages are plausibly understood , not as attempts to repudiate our ideals of objectivity, truth, etc., wholesale, but rather as efforts to correct inadequacies of familiar philosophical renderings of those ideals. In undertaking this project, I will be rejecting the suggestion of convergence between Wittgenstein’s thought and the specific strand of neopragmatic thought that Rorty, for example, associates with it. But 370 SOCIAL RESEARCH it is no part of my ambition to deny the existence of any fruitful connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and work in the pragmatic tradition. On the contrary, one of my central goals is to show that, when its pragmatic emphasis is properly understood, Wittgenstein’s view of language equips us to address and illuminate problems of political thought in reference to which contemporary pragmatisms attempt to demonstrate...

Why Knowledge is Unnecessary for Understanding Language

It is a natural thought that understanding language consists in possessing knowledge-to understand a word is to know what it means. It is also natural to suppose that this knowledge is propositional knowledge-to know what a word means is to know that it means such-and-such. Thus it is prima facie plausible to suppose that understanding a bit of language consists in possessing propositional knowledge of its meaning. I refer to this as the epistemic view of understanding language. The theoretical appeal of this view for the philosophy of language is that it provides for an attractive account of the project of the theory of meaning. If understanding language consists in possessing propositional knowledge of the meanings of expressions, then a meaning theory amounts to a theory of what speakers know in virtue of understanding language. In this paper I argue that, despite its intuitive and theoretical appeal, the epistemic view is false. Propositional knowledge is not necessary for understanding language, not even tacit knowledge. Unlike knowledge, I argue, linguistic understanding does not fail in Gettier cases, does not require epistemic warrant and does not even require belief. The intuitions about knowledge that have been central to epistemology do not seem to hold for linguistic understanding. So unless epistemologists have been radically mistaken about what knowledge requires, knowledge is unnecessary for understanding language.

Children's chants

Language acquisition is for young children interacting with the language spoken around them. Children learn quite a bit of language by imitation, by repeating the various language forms they hear. It is not enough for children just to hear language; they must also interact with it. When we think of the methods used in teaching high school or college students a second language, we can then understand why interacting in communication is important for young children. One cannot speak Spanish fluently just by reading a Spanish grammar book; one must speak Spanish in order to speak it fluently.

Teen-Age Hophead Jargon

world. As David Maurer once said in writing of the argot of the underworld drug addict, constant checking of lists of the ever changing argot of addicts is necessary for understanding.' Recent investigations of teen-age addiction conducted in several of our larger cities, such as New York and Washington, have impressed upon all socially conscious people the gravity of the problem, but they have also brought to public attention an interesting bit of language in the making. No longer is the jargon of the drug addict hidden from the general public, for it is rapidly becoming well known through the press, radio, and television. The methods of recruiting used by teen-age drug users have also in themselves brought out in the open the lingo of the juvenile addict. Although many of the terms used are very old, the teen-agers have learned and changed the 'hophead jargon' to meet their own peculiar needs, particularly the need for hiding their meaning. For example, consider the unintelligibility of this statement by a drug addict: 'I heard fellows who go up buying food talking about: Man, I'm short fifty cents, let me have fifty cents, all I got is two-fifty. ' The greater portion of the source material for this brief study has been derived from newspapers (New York Times, San Diego Union, San Diego Evening Tribune), periodicals (Life, NEA Journal, Time), interviews of teenagers at Anthony Home (temporary detention home for juvenile delinquents of San Diego County), and personal letters from the Los Angeles and New York police departments and the Board of Education of New York. After the words were compiled, dictionaries such as A Dictionary of the Underworld and The American Thesaurus of Slang have served as checking sources for words entered and any change of meanings. The glossaries of the studies of narcotic argot by David Maurer have proved valuable for purposes of comparison. Several radio and television programs broadcasting interviews and recordings of the recent investigations in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Diego were found to be of general value.