This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
When the Argus editors-in-chief invited me to participate in the “Pragmatic Hope” series, I initially leaned toward sharing some ideas about the insights and sense of purpose students could gain from “thinking globally and acting locally.” My own early experiences as a young faculty member volunteering in a new Planned Parenthood clinic in Middletown, followed by my decades-long involvement in recycling and environmental advocacy in the City and on campus, had taught me that putting one’s time, energy, and skills at the service of one’s communities builds efficacy, counteracts despair, and engages others in productive collective actions.
But thinking about skills shifted my focus to a specific ability, one that has been at the core of my training, scholarship, and teaching, and one of the most versatile and valuable gifts you can acquire in the course of your education. This gift is the ability to recognize the infinitely varied forms of language that surround us, to assess their effects, and then to take advantage of the enormous communicative possibilities language provides. In an age of constant babble, being able to break through the noise with meaningful speech and writing is a goal worth striving for.
So how can you become a sophisticated and skilled receiver and producer of language?
One way is to study a second or third language. Although I recognize that not everyone enjoys or has success with learning languages, I can assure you that the time spent studying them is not wasted. Instruction at the college level goes far beyond basic communicative tasks such as introducing oneself or ordering a meal in a restaurant abroad. It introduces the complex relationship between a specific language and the histories and cultures of those who speak (or once spoke) it. As a result of language study you develop a new awareness of the characteristics of the language all around us and your own and others’ use of it.
An obvious way to heighten your appreciation of language is to take courses on literature and acquaint yourself with the many interpretive approaches literary scholars can employ. Acquiring the tools of literary analysis helps you dig into the texts you read and find the riches below the surface. Learning to identify rhetorical devices, idioms, linguistic registers, styles, point of view, and other features of literary language also helps you detect the intentions behind the messages bombarding us in social media, advertising, the press, government utterances, and everyday conversations.
Taking courses in a wide range of subjects will further enlarge your recognition of the vastly varied contents and contexts language can express. You will learn the current conventions of speaking and writing in different fields and, if you read widely, you will realize that over time the academic disciplines have yielded countless theories and technical concepts and vocabularies, none of which have proved definitive but most of which have contributed, in large ways or small, to the sum of human knowledge. Likewise, reading texts in different genres and on different subjects from a wide range of times and places will add to your repertoire and encourage you to experiment with different ways to articulate perceptions, ideas, beliefs, emotions, desires, impressions, and assertions.
I have already mentioned writing several times, but I cannot stress enough the importance becoming a writer who can compose convincingly in a wide range of contexts and for a multitude of purposes. Apply to your own writing what you have been learning from studying language(s), literature, and other subjects, and from your reading. Give yourself time, and muster the patience, to revise every paper at least twice. You should seize every opportunity to get detailed critiques from your instructors, if possible sitting down with them to go over their comments on what you have submitted. Some faculty members will let you rewrite papers, either for a chance to improve your grade or for the practice. Exchanging papers with friends once they have been graded can provide further insights.
Grammar, hardly taught anymore in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools, suffers from the popular perception of being boring and intolerant of creativity and widely accepted variations. That may be true of the prescriptive variant of grammar, which declares that in English, for example, “She don’t love me no more” is incorrect. Even prescriptive grammar, however, can be helpful, telling us for example, to avoid “dangling participial constructions,” as in the sentence, “Dashing down the stairs, Marie’s knee buckled, and she spent the next three weeks on crutches” (was her knee
dashing down the stairs all by itself?)
But grammar also has a descriptive function: characterizing the structures and elements of a language, such as the parts of speech, making the distinction between active and passive voice, and clarifying the contrast between indicative and subjunctive moods (I confine myself here to the Indo-European languages). To conclude this discussion of the pragmatic advantages that acquiring a sophisticated understanding of language confers, let me introduce the most precious reference work in my library: Heinz Paechter’s little glossary, Nazi-Deutsch, published in 1944 by Frederick Ungar, who, like Paechter, was a refugee from Hitler’s Europe. Paechter put together his glossary for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. In his brief introduction, “The Spirit and Structure of Nazi Language,” Paechter analyzes the Nazis’ use of language as a means of social control. The ideal sentence in this language, he says, is a chant made up entirely of nouns: “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer.” The absence of verbs focuses the crowd at a rally in Berlin’s huge Sportpalast on “an order of the world,” an inevitable, unquestionable structure. A phrase like “the final solution of the Jewish problem,” also consisting only of nouns, omits any mention of who might carry out such a “solution”—the grammatical form portrays the Holocaust as a fait accompli for which no one bears responsibility. If a verb must be used, Paechter says, the weak copula “to be” creates the same sense of inevitability. He gives the example of “The Reich is the Führer.” Paechter glosses this formulation thus: “The nation is lined up behind the speaker, acceptance of his leadership by the audience was pre arranged.” He points out that Hitler routinely avoids using active verbs; the passive voice conveys a static situation, not to be questioned.
We know that the Nazis exploited the most modern technology at their disposal to pound their mythology, ideology, and false narratives into a population still reeling from Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the imposition of a democratic constitution by the Allies, the galloping inflation of the early Twenties, and the depression that started with the U.S. stock market crash in 1929. Affordable radios, manufactured on orders from the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, carried the Nazi leaders’ speeches and uplifting music into every home; newsreels and propaganda films provided propaganda masked as information and entertainment; vehicles equipped with loudspeakers on their roofs crisscrossed the cities, blaring slogans, speeches, and commands, with applause and chants as soundtracks in the background.
Today’s technological penetration of our waking and sleeping hours far exceeds that of Goebbels’s propaganda machine. The slogans (“MAGA,” “MAHA,” “Great Big Beautiful Bill”), the repeated labeling of peaceful demonstrators, Democratic politicians, and international students who write op-eds for their school newspapers as “lunatics,” the charges of anti-Semitism and “narcoterrorism”—all these uses of language fit a familiar pattern. At the same time, the patter of influencers and the ceaseless parade of advertisements distract the public and encourage unsustainable consumption.
Among the chief benefits of your liberal-arts education should be the skill to recognize the purpose of such manipulation and reveal its effects convincingly to individuals, groups, and audiences from a variety of backgrounds. Your experiences on this campus and in the surrounding community will equip you for that task. Although those who seek to undermine institutions like ours charge them with being homogeneous (in this case a slur), in fact our students, faculty, and staff embody a good deal of the diversity that makes the U.S. such a fascinating and dynamic country. If you cultivate genuine appreciation of and for that diversity, can articulate the value of freedom of speech and inquiry, and acquire the ability to use language sensitively to communicate in classrooms, residence halls, studios, labs, and other settings, you will be well prepared for the kind of communication we all need if we are to reach agreement on the problems we face and make necessary changes.
Krishna Winston is the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature and a Professor of Environmental Studies Emerita. She can be reached at kwinston@wesleyan.edu.
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