I.A. Richards, Swearing, and Context

Eight or nine years ago, I took an ethics course in seminary, and not surprisingly, we were expected to write a paper at the end of the class that examined an ethical issue, and proposed a remedy. Just for grins, I chose the topic of swearing. In the process of researching that issue, I ran across several fascinating arguments, and a few ludicrous ones. For instance (and unfortunately, I do not have a citation for this any longer), one writer argued that swearing is unethical, and that does not only extend to “four-letter words,”—you know, the pantheon of shockers that has traditionally been banned on TV—but even milder constructions, like “jeez” or “nuts.” The problem, the argument went, is that if you trace the etymology of these words far enough back, they become vulgar.

Even at that time, never having read I.A. Richards, this reeked of, shall we say, horse pellets. The problem, I reasoned in my paper, is that we do not really treat any words that way—it matters not whether “dork” can be traced back to male genitalia (and it can)—we use words the way they are conventionally used now, and not the way they were once understood. In other words, context is everything.

Thanks for sticking with me. Here’s where Richards comes in: I see him making a similar move with his claims about meaning. There were critics at the time that believed that words, divorced from their context, could still signify; Richards begged to differ. Instead, language is fluid, and meaning is not fixed. In fact, Richards mentions the idea that a text is not stable. He takes issue with George Campbell and others who imagine that there are good and correct ways to use words, and therefore, there are good and correct ways to understand texts. Instead, criticism and hermeneutics is always a matter of educated guesswork.

The other thing that I think Richards gives us as a broader frame of reference for rhetoric. I liked his pithy, if somewhat puzzling definition of rhetoric: “the study of misunderstanding and its remedies”. But really, what Richards is after (just like Burke, and Booth, and others) is a more robust sphere of influence for rhetoric. For Aristotle and Plato, rhetoric was about probable arguments in the public sphere, and that seems to have been the case for Ramus, too. Though Astell privatized rhetoric to a degree in seeing it, for women, as mainly pertaining to private conversation, it was still about recommending right and prudent action. Yet for Richards, rhetoric is not merely public persuasion, not merely about the probable. Rhetoric, instead, exists wherever there is discourse, whenever there is the possibility of meaning.

That means rhetoric becomes about language and meaning, and in that way, it transcends the traditional boundaries set for it. It becomes possible to theorize about the ways that rhetoric bleeds into poetics, and even into expository discourse (which is not overtly persuasive). And it paves the way for discussions of rhetoric whereby symbols are not limited to words.