Moral Value Judgments Research Articles

Space in Speech

ONE OF the most important ways in which our speech is enlarged in scope, enriched in color, and endowed with useful distinctions, is the employment of simile and metaphor, which are really variants of the same principle. By saying or suggesting that one thing is like another one, which at first sight may seem totally unlike it, we assign to the designated object a new value and a fresh aspect. Similarly, when a physical relationship between objects or persons is used to express a spiritual one, we have a source of language enrichment of almost unlimited extent. Some years ago, following up such a line of inquiry, I examined in a short article which I entitled 'The Higher the Better'l the effect upon our speech of the seemingly universal idea that elevation above the ground is in itself desirable. I should like to extend that inquiry now to embrace further connotations of the spatial relations between fixed or moving objects and beings. Basically, what we have as germinal concept is a location in space to which some other location-or it may also be a motion-is related, with visual images serving always as the starting-point. Thus, one object is said to be beside, before, behind, below, or above another, or between two others, the original assumption being no doubt that the eye of the beholder saw them so. On a slightly more subtle plane is the affirmation that something is inside or outside-which cannot always be determined by the eye-or that one thing or being is found among a body or group of others. Still more refined thinking underlies such ideas as at, on, and with, in which the spatial relation fuses with action or utility and the like ('at the desk,' 'on the job,' 'with all his might'). Now, the interesting thing is that out of the mechanical and neutral facts thus recorded there have grown spiritual and moral value-judgments of considerable range and complexity. It is these evaluations which have particularly aroused my interest and curiosity. The attempt to account for them takes us into that vast and as yet little exploited field of semantic development or word-history in which I see one of the most fruitful sources for the doctoral dissertations of the future. The most copious and in many ways most interesting material is afforded by the general relation of higher and lower, and I now find that my previous study fell far short of exhausting that subject. This is