Babel Revisited — AIGA | the professional association for design 7/29/10 10:19 PM

F R O M V O I C E ~ TOPICS: diversity, international, multiculturalism

Babel Revisited
by Ralph Caplan July 20, 2010

T he philosopher Emil Cioran wrote, “One doesn’t live in a country, one lives in a language.” I believe
that’s true as far as it goes; with me, though, it doesn’t go as far as it should. I am embarrassed to
acknowledge that I have only one language. High school Latin is at best an oppressive memory (and no
one spoke it anyway). A year of French in college empowered me only to pass a required test and to make
my wants known to any sympathetic French person who understands English. During a brief tour of duty
in China long ago I fell in love with the language and worked hard and joyously to learn it. But I wasn’t
there long enough to learn enough, and I returned to the States equipped to do nothing more than order
a few dishes in Chinese restaurants, and then only if the waiter knew Mandarin, which most did not. So
if we live in a language, I live solely, and somewhat uncomfortably, in this one.

That is no one’s fault but my own. I admire, but have never emulated, the idealistic energy of a retired
neurologist friend who last year began to study Farsi because “taking on a new language as a first step to
connecting with people we make no real effort to understand is something I can actually do.”

Last Fourth of July the poet Gregory Djanikian, born in Egypt of Armenian heritage, wrote a poem
describing “how we might contribute to that great melting pot that is the English language….” Every
Fourth of July calls up tired references to the “melting pot,” but I had never before heard it applied to the
language. This breaks new ground. Or, for me, it breaks old ground anew. The town I grew up in was
ethnically diverse enough to be called a melting pot. I suppose, if I thought about it at all, I assumed that
every place was. The diversity, originating largely in accidents of European immigration and American
geography and industry, was not evenly distributed. We had a heavy concentration of Poles, Greeks,
Czechs, Ukrainians, Russians, Croatians, Italians. No Swedes that I know of, or Norwegians. Only a few
Irish. Anglo Saxons stood out for their scarcity and were the elite. It was a mill town, and most jobs were
factory jobs. The Anglo Saxons were for the most part plant managers. A small Jewish community of
about 70 families was comprised chiefly of merchants.

The town’s classes were not upper and lower. They were American and foreign, which amounted very
largely to the same thing. Anglo Saxons were known locally as “Americans.” The hierarchy of
nationalities was expressed in a way peculiar to the region. “Language,” in addition to its conventional
meaning, was synonymous with nationality. Language was not just what you spoke, but what you were.

If you asked what language a person was, the answer might be Polish, Czech or Italian. This did not
mean that the person you were inquiring about spoke any of those, although they might have. It meant
that’s what their I.D. card would have said, had there been one issued locally.

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The melting pot was at best an imperfect vessel. Some ingredients were slower to melt than others. I
remember telling someone that the son of our neighborhood convenience store owner had just become
engaged. “What language is she?” I was asked. “American,” I said. “It’ll never work,” he said. (As far as I
know, it did; at least for awhile.) The usage seemed perfectly normal to me. Even after I discovered that
the rest of the world thought language and nationality had different meanings, I viewed our use of the
terms affectionately as just another of the linguistic peculiarities of a region that went to “pitniks” in the
summer, lived in houses where Santa Claus came down a “chimley” and where young adults who didn’t
have jobs lived with their “famblies.”

It has occurred to me lately that our local aberrations were prophetic, or at least no laughing matter.
Language was not the main thing that separated us then, but it is likely to be now. Designers, being
generalists to begin with, specialize awkwardly, referring constantly to the difficulty of not being
understood by people who speak the language of business, the language of academia, the language of fine
art. And even within the design community it isn’t always easy for architects to converse with interaction
designers, or for graphic consultants to communicate with interior designers.

Certain aspects of design have always required some translation when described to laymen. But
technology today advances and changes at such a rapid pace that conventional sources of information
cannot keep up with new terms called into play by new phenomena. This of course is not limited to the
design professions. No one over age 60 finds it easy to communicate with digital natives without first
learning some foreign expressions. In June the standards editor at the New York Times issued a memo
asking writers to avoid using the word “tweet,” explaining, “we favor established usage and ordinary
words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.” That shocked David Pogue, the paper’s technical columnist,
into devoting his July 8 column to the meaning and functions of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the
like. At the height of 1960s angst it was seriously suggested that we were creating a world where
everybody would need a personal therapist. Perhaps we’re creating one in which everyone needs an
interpreter.

About the Author: Ralph Caplan is the author of Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design and Its Side Effects and
By Design. Caplan is the former editor of I.D. magazine, and has been a columnist for both I.D. and Print. He
lectures widely, was a writer-in-residence at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deere Isle, Maine, and
teaches in the graduate Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts. Caplan is also the recipient of a 2010
National Design Award.

Dropping Out as a Disciplined Choice

by Ralph Caplan
Do you find yourself un-friending Facebook and opting out of LinkedIn? In his second Salinger–
inspired post, Caplan defends the right to remain private.
Neurath, Bliss and the Language of the Pictogram

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