Sean Coon muses about how Silly String completes trees. Well, actually, he muses about the shape of language, wrapped in an homage to his felicitously-named mentor, Bill Readings.

I like a lot what Sean says and the people he quotes from. And it makes clear just how un-tree-like is the structure of language. Ferdinad de Saussure, whom Sean quotes, talks about words not as leaves on forking conceptual branches — a picture Aristotle might have liked and that WordNet assumes — but words as standing in distinction from other words. Saussure’s view does not resolve into anything like a tree. At least as far as I remember. Likewise, when the British philosopher John Austin says that the word “real” usually doesn’t signify some positive quality but merely flags a distinction in mode — we only talk about a real gun if we need to distinguish it from a toy gun, a fake gun carved from soap, or a pretend gun made by pointing a finger — the meaning of “real” does not consist of its position in a tree.

Language, it seems to me, generally lacks the basic properties that make a tree a tree, with the one important exception that sometimes concepts contain other concepts. But there’s lots more to trees than that. E.g., a tree structure has a top and bottom. The elements are discrete. Each element hangs from one branch. All the branches signify the same basic relationship. The branches inherit essential characteristics from the branches they’re attached to. Branches have essential characteristics. Meanings can be traced and paths can be followed. The organization is neat, not messy. And even the basic notion of containment is a metaphor and way too general: Does “color” contain “red” the way “nation” contains “city” and the way “actor” contains “David Caruso” ? And, by the way, “yard” does not contain “dog” even if your dog is in your yard and “stomach” does not contain “peanut” even if you’ve just eaten one.

Sean’s post doesn’t get stuck in the tree metaphor. On the contrary. He uses Silly String to remind us that the tree of language has messy connections among its leaves. He points out that language isn’t a single tree, the same for all. He refers usefully to Saussure and Barthes.

So why stick with the tree metaphor at all? It’s gotten in the way of understanding for about 2,000 years now. (Porphyry is usually credited with being the first to draw categories in the shape of a tree.) Except in the limited domains where we carefully structure language into a tree, I think we ought to drop it.

I tried to get at this, or at least hint at it, in my reply to Julian Bond’s comment on a post of mine a few days ago. Or, as a certain book puts it, everything is miscellaneous…although that phrase by itself is misleading unless we immediately ask: Then why didn’t it stay that way?

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