Books: A Confusion of Tongues

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"I Love You." Being a popularizer of linguistics is no easy task. When he gets to "paralanguage"-the meanings resident in the ways words are voiced -Farb begins to belabor the obvious. Every lover knows that "I love you" is a vocal variable, to be interpreted by the vibrations. In his enthusiasm for "body language"-the things said by facial expressions, gestures, posture -Farb goes far beyond most scholars of the new linguistics. "Pupil performance," he proclaims, "does not depend so much upon a school's audio-visual equipment or new textbooks or enriching trips to museums as it does upon teachers whose body language communicates high expectations."

Still, when the theorizing becomes heavy, Farb knows how to entertain himself and his readers with a rich miscellany of random facts and provocative (if not always documented) opinions that spill beyond his outline:

— The champion pedants in any language, he says, turn out to be heavy users of slang. Adolescents, applying slang to test "who belongs to the group and who is an intruder," are, Farb contends, "more severe about standards for its correct usage" than the fussiest schoolmarm.

>— The champion scatologists, he argues, are Germans, who tend to roll in the aisles after the first hint of a comic's outhouse smirk. Is martinet toilet training the explanation? Farb wonders but never decides.

— The world's greatest verbal prudes seem to be the Nupe of West Africa, a tribe that does not have a native word for defecate, menstruation or semen. For sexual intercourse, they are forced to borrow from Arabic a chaste verb meaning "to connect."

What, finally, is the new moral of the ancient story of language? That in language, as in fife, people end up with what they want-and perhaps deserve. The cryptic Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ur-father of the new linguistics, who spoke best in aphorisms, put it thus: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." One's words, for better and for worse, define one's reality, and what you say is what you get. "Melvin Maddocks