Snow and Language

C. P. Snow famously noted the inability of scientists to communicate with their liberal arts colleagues at Cambridge. As a scientist, he tended to blame the other side for not keeping up.

The problem isn’t so much that they have different interests and that those of science have become much more difficult to grasp since Einstein, but that the two groups use language differently.

In the liberal arts, there is some attempt to write in the current lingua franca, albeit, often a highly artificial and convoluted form. But words still tend to have meanings that can be deduced from context.

In science, there is a deliberate attempt to appropriate words and give them arcane meanings. As an example, they discuss secular trends in temperature in the mantle.

Now, to someone with any exposure to western civilization, secular is usually contrasted with religious, meaning that controlled by the civil or political world. Try to apply that to previous sentence.

After searching a bit in Google, I found economists had used the term secular to refer to long term trends, probably from some discussion of those events outside the control of the church hierarchy in the middle ages. That was enough. Scientists like to appear au courant. They adopted a word used by the movers and shakers of the world.

Graduate school is a time for adapting to new rules of discourse where many want, nay actively conspire to make an aspirant fail. Make a comment about the social background of Hawthorne to an English professor influenced by William Empson and you’re guaranteed a poor grade. Quote some fact from your historical geography text to an economics history professor who thinks it’s wrong and watch him look at you with dismay.

But these misadventures are nothing compared to what must happen when people enter into science. It begins in high school with never spelling out a word, but using abbreviations. One never says water when H₂O will do. One couldn’t possibly say the year 2000. Those zeros, that extraneous word thousand had to disappear. We all learned to say Y2K. For an historian it became the label for a technological crisis and the date remained a date. I’m not sure what happened in science, but so far I haven’t seen Y2K11.

It’s rather like science became captive to a group of men who never outgrew the thrill of using Pig Latin in their boyhood tree house sanctuaries. The primary initiation ritual was speaking obfuscation. And so, scientists and social scientists make proficiency in jargon their badge of identity.

Snow wasn’t the first to recognize the problems with language. It was an Oxford mathematician, Charles Ludwig Dodgson, who used the pen name Lewis Carroll to write:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'

Notes:
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass, 1871.

Snow, C. P. “The Two Cultures,”1959.

Photos: Jemez behind badlands with (top) far arroyo in front.