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Envelope WordsNovember 01, 2005 "Sleeping pills make you sleep because of their soporific effect." That's how the fussy little professor I had for European Intellectual History explained "tautology" -- at least that's what I think he was explaining: a statement that was true by definition and didn't actually explain anything. "Soporific" means "causing or tending to cause sleep," so what the statement is saying is that sleeping pills make you sleep because they make you sleep. Marge Piercy comes at it from a different angle in her poem "For the Young Who Want To":
Then, in the last stanza: "Talent / is an invention like phlogiston / after the fact of fire." "Talent" explains nothing, not the quality of the novel nor how you managed to finish it. The word comes in handy, though. It appears to explain the otherwise inexplicable. It also lets people off the hook: they don't write because they don't have "talent," that apparently innate gift without which all the effort in the world is sterile. The author of my current job likes the word "corruption." Governments are characterized by corruption, people don't trust governments because they're corrupt, etc., etc. Pretty soon you're thinking "corruption = criminal behavior -> people who practice corruption = criminals -> the government is run by criminals so what chance do the honest citizens have?" A small statistic caught my eye: The low- to mid-level bureaucrats in one particular government, says my author, make only $106 a month. Aha, thought I; how do you support a family on $106 a month without a little graft on the side? In another country, businesses that deal with the government are said to distinguish between "good corruption" and "bad corruption": "good corruption" is when you fork over the bribe and the task gets accomplished; "bad corruption" is when you fork over the bribe and nothing happens. Bribes, I realized, aren't unlike what we call "commissions," or the entry fees for all those infernal poetry contests. As a concept, it seems, "corruption" has a lot in common with "talent." It's used to explain certain circumstances, but it doesn't really explain anything. They're "envelope words": big manila envelopes that you stuff old letters and cancelled checks and possibly fixable necklaces into and put in a drawer somewhere. After a while, the only way you know what's in the envelope is that it says "Correspondence" on the outside. The particulars fade from memory -- and why not? You know they're there, in the envelope, in the drawer; you can take them out any time you want. But you don't. I don't. We don't. We toss words like "corruption" and "talent" around as if they explain things, when really they're just a handy shorthand, an envelope, for a lot of unruly bits of information. Periodically someone surveys USians about the Bill of Rights: nearly everyone says they support the Bill of Rights, but when they're asked to vote yes or no on its various component amendments, they're agin most of 'em. Perplexing? Not really; not if you think of the Bill of Rights as a big manila envelope stuffed in a drawer somewhere.
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