How to Read a Page

THIS book, frankly “a retort to Mortimer Adler’s How. to Read a Book and to Scott Buchanan’s Hundred Books Program,” is by the co-author (with C. K. Ogden) of The Meaning of Meaning, which is a (if not the) basic text of the science of psycho-verbal analysis known as semantics — the science popularized (or, as Mr. Richards might write it, !popularized!) by such books as Hugh Walpole’s Semantics and Stuart Chase’s Tyranny of Words.

How to Read a Page is a sort of graduate course in semantics. Dedicated to the proposition that “every careful reader is willy-nilly a Dialectician in some measure,” it presents us with an apparatus for progressive self-training in detection of the tricks that words can play on the unwary mind. From differences that the simplest can grasp — for example, that between “There are 261 words [separated clumps of letters] on this page” and “There are only 110 words [distinct forms of such clumps] on this [the same] page” — the analysis works up to distinctions that all but a handful of the elect will find gaseous. A large part of the space is given to the 103 indispensable, omnipresent, inveterately ambiguous words of a list that begins with amount, argument, art, be (eight meanings) and ends with thought (eight meanings), true, use, way, wise, word, work. Underlying the whole discussion is the indubitable principle that words get their meanings from contexts. Behind it all is the favorite obsession of semanticists: to wit, that the disorders of human life, the defects of human institutions, and the perversities of human nature are prevailingly if not entirely the consequences of failure to make sufficiently accurate determinations of the meanings of crucial words in crucial contexts. W.F.