Why Steven Pinker is Wrong on Innuendo and What it's Real Use Is

Part One:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU

Steven Pinker’s “Language as a Window into Human Nature” identifies the difference between innuendo and direct speech as arising as a need to maintain relationships in terms of innuendo and a way to overthrow oppressive people as a result of direct speech and mutual knowledge. The human desire for both a relationship and love becomes a gulf that often needs to be navigated using the bridge of innuendo so that we don’t have to risk losing what we already have with another person. It’s important to realize that when we ask the question “How is language used as a deceptive device?” it is we who are using the language. Big words like “Love,” or “God,” may be thought of as blending individual and mutual knowledge in the most personal fashion imaginable. Love can be for anyone or anything but is also extremely personal; in social penetration theory intimacy is viewed in a risk vs. reward context.

The concept of God is beyond anyone’s imagination but arises out of a feeling that everything came to being for a reason and that we as individuals are ultimately part of everything else that is. So when we use individual and mutual knowledge to describe the difference between innuendo and direct language it is a duality that we are distinctly aware of as human beings. When we use language deceptively we have specific intentions and rely on the other person taking into account our personal doubt and reservations about what we really truly want from the other person. Our desires cannot be completely satisfied by our bosses, we in fact hate asking them for anything because we feel like we deserve the money they pay us and often believe we deserve a raise. We deceive because we yearn for power or money or mutual knowledge and understanding and deception is one way to get those things we all desire. This is also why we are dishonest; most of the time our true desires happily stay in the background because society can view them as disruptive of it’s larger functioning. Addicts make the most consistent liars, in my experience.

The “profound consequences” of the difference between individual and mutual knowledge is framed in terms of political revolution, a concept I’m not sure has much meaning to me. In terms of history, successful revolutions are quite few and most of them die out relatively quickly. Thinking of revolution as a positive movement of mutual knowledge is problematic in my eyes. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were great moments when mutual knowledge supposedly created a much more understanding population to bring justice to the oppressed. What we really fail to realize is that America was one of the last countries in world history to even allow slavery because after 1888 slavery was abolished in all the Americas after Brazil enacted the “Golden Law.” The loss of life in the Civil War was horrendous and could have been avoided using trade tariffs or being more active getting slaves North of the border. The Revolutionary War that “gave” Americans their righteous sense of freedom was often used selfishly to scalp Indians and steal their land. The idea that early Americans weren’t greedy violent opportunistic capitalists is based on idealism. I personally believe that if society were honest, ideas like this would pass into mutual knowledge and people would accept one another and their own feelings.

The idea that we need people to be sheltered and veiled in order to have intimate relationships with them is a very old and archaic idea. Many people feel like being literal or using explicit language can only offer them a piece of knowledge that is pre-packaged and there is no way to interpret or really think of the idea in new or interesting or, more accurately, personal ways. So the question of a society functioning if there was absolute honesty becomes something extremely intimidating because people feel this fundamental tension between inside and outside. I feel like this tension can only be resolved if society accepts the inner desires of all it’s citizens or transforms it in a way that fosters honesty, happiness, and closeness with one another. The truth of money is that it functions as the key to all our desires and happiness and is so often worth deceiving others for. There are many reasons one of which is we all accept this as the truth of capitalism and are having moral conundrums unlike anything known previously. If the good are the qualities or things that we love then money is the means to transform our desire to become completely satisfied using it. The idea that our society needs to shift the incentive shows what I think is a misunderstanding of human nature and a belief that it can be changed. In a society of absolute honesty people’s desire would be out in the open instead of hidden away, which is something that capitalism is in a way striving for. However, competition and “scarcity of resources” leads to everyone wanting to get in each other’s way. Being honest about something very rarely changes it, but an honest society would require everyone to drop their motives and desires and judgments and maybe even love something they never loved before.

Part Two:

The use of innuendo is debatable partly because people use it in different ways and partly because people use it without thinking: as a tool of convenience. Thinking of language as a tool of convenience can sometimes seem like an easy path to discovering our nature and the fundamental principles of the system of language. What I want to argue about regarding innuendo is that it can operate as something very different from a veil and instead act as an honest barometer of other people’s opinions. Pinker explains that this is true, that “even obvious innuendos merely provide individual knowledge.” But it’s my feeling that allowing individual knowledge to be expressed can be helpful in creating mutual knowledge when ideas fit one another without prior knowledge of the other. This can create a reservoir of knowledge where there was just fact.

But I’m not done with Pinker here. His assumption that innuendo points to a real and specific piece of mutual knowledge is annoying to me. His assumption is that “allusive and oblique remarks” point to truth and hidden understanding gives too much credit to innuendo and not enough to our capacity to figure it out for ourselves. We who have used innuendo to veil our true intentions and desires are living in a world where we’re unfulfilled and choose to use language to express that aspect of us. We may feel as if we should employ all parts of language to give shades of meaning to our words in order to be better understood when instead we should use allusive language to cover our thoughts so they don’t infringe on the experience of the other.

Innuendo is best used when observing things where an analogous situation can be invoked to force someone to draw connections to other realities from the one you’re facing in front of you. Ultimately, the art of innuendo can be saved if it’s used correctly. Bastardized versions might be the end of the true art if we forget its potency. If you recognize a feeling of deja-vu it comes rushing back to you when you’re listening to music or in a certain place because it evokes something inside that was buried for a long time and only came back because a certain part of your mind was activated that was the closest approximation to what you’re feeling in that moment. At its best, innuendo will evoke a foreign type of identification that will have you searching inside for the thread. This deja-vu that you feel coming from somewhere but losing it as soon as your revert back to your understanding. Deja-vu that can only be understood by noting the feeling, isolating that feeling, questioning the feeling itself and feeling it as the true source of everything it explains.

For most, deja-vu is uncomfortable. So let’s try another idea: innuendo as the simplest explanation for complex or mysterious phenomena. Here, I think, is the exact reason innuendo grew to be so strong and eventually popularized. Simple explanations are ways of showing you’re above them in the quest for personal maturity and also are the things people latch onto most when they’re confused. Fun games can be played where sarcasm places previously powerless people on a perch above the pit of perpetual perceptions. People can attach themselves to innuendo under the assumption other people know they’re offering only a little bit of the pie. The drive to do that is similar to an invitation to explain something they find impossible to explain. I think that in a chaotic world the ability to come up with simple solutions for people is highly valued. Instead of innuendo deposing the despot like in Pinker, innuendo is the creation of a Donald Trump figure to take down the multitude of problems in a flaming pile of hairballs. Cough. A human model of expulsion and/or function of an unhappy system.

In a sense, both analogy and explanation are similar. Explanations account for the complexity of things in a surprising way while analogies are taken from the complexity of reality to offer something consistent and real to us. This process if done well is typically difficult while Pinker’s innuendo is simple and straightforward.

Let me now give an example of something that came and arose a type of deja-vu mixed with plausible explanations and mystery. I came again upon a pond in the Huntington Gardens on Saturday. The fish again had gone together according to color. Initially, my roommate and leading laser scientist Prathemeesh Donwalker didn’t believe me so I made him wait as fish started swimming away in twos of white, orange, and black. Then four white ones swam up to us and he started to become convinced. I could tell because he said he’d had enough. Incidentally, he hadn’t had enough because two baby ducks waddled up to us with their parents. Must’ve been no more than about 5 inches tall. Kids started to throw sand at them and I had to tell them to stop. One could only imagine their innuendo: “gosh, those yellow ducks sure look soft.” This is the obvious and childish innuendo of Pinker: the expression of a forbidden desire leaving the question of their own inner morality as the difference between sensory bliss and the life of daffy.

We return to the fish and too our ideal and fully matured innuendo. Our innuendo where the black and gold fish resonate Wiz Khalifa, orange police sirens, and white fish Hildegaard von Bingen kyries. There is nothing but music to compare these poor fish to. Our innuendo is most profound in the coupling of fish because a simple analogy for their flocking together can be reached if you consider them slowing down for another like the ones they are with. How would pairs of colored fish float away next to each other as if made in a factory again and again? This is very hard to explain. The possibility that a fish could identify itself with its own color is odd and seemingly impossible but can only be proved with observation. Their eyes are no made to see themselves. Here is where innuendo gets weird: could our essence, our true being radiate from the material we are made of? That we experience our body the way it was designed by our DNA? This is a serious question.

It’s hard to describe but that feeling of being something with spots or something dark, or light is the only explanation I can find for this phenomenon. If your skin has a growth sometimes the area itches maybe the development of spots or the darkening of pigment can leave a chemical imprint on the brain. I know this sounds ridiculous so I’ll return back home for the home stretch. The only motive I have for thinking this has to do with seeing so many fish travel in these pairs and groups, and leave in pairs. If its purely a sexual mate thing it doesn’t explain them flocking and if it’s a social thing it doesn’t explain the coupling really. Even if it is just a coupling thing the idea an experience can be imprinted on an animal of that intelligence and guide its behavior for long stretches of time and in so many examples is strange. This leads me to my conclusion.

When we categorize ourselves we identify ourselves in a certain way. The idea a fish can categorize and identify itself shows its deeply embedded in consciousness. Innuendo is, in fact, a chance to point out the stupidity of placing identification in the lofty place we put it. It’s a way of pointing out human nature to break it not insinuate desire to know if it’s safe or not. Pinker’s attempts to explain innuendo come out disingenuous because he uses it without thinking of all its contexts and the context his examples play out for. Maybe we’ve gotten good at identification and scientific knowledge but there’s much more to life and the Internet than the feeling of having “mutual knowledge” or identification.