¹ I confess that I do not quite understand this term: we are told that there is a primary response to language when someone speaks a language; a secondary one when someone speaks about language (and then one is alert and good-humored—though the contents of the speech are quite conventional); a tertiary one when someone reacts to observations of an expert linguist (and then one is excited and hostile because his ideas are aberrant from conventional thinking).

I would rather think the logical sequence to be: 1. to speak a language; 2. to speak about language, whether (a) as linguist or (b) as layman; 3. to speak about linguistic theories, whether (a) as linguist or (b) as layman. Thus the hostile attitude of the layman described by Bloomfield belongs only to 3b, not to 3a. I am interested in this pedantic distinction, because I beg to be listed under 3a.

^1a Style and the efficacy of style, although not reducible to bio-sociology, are realities. So, too, is that particular Stimmung evoked in us by the moon—although, as far as I know, not yet reducible to natural forces. Would a description of the moon containing no mention of its evocative powers be complete?

² I quote these two sentences from the mottoes of R. von Mises, Ein kleines Handbuch des Positivismus.

³ Getting angry is no prerogative of the mentalists; it is a characteristic reaction of anyone whose thinking habits are unexpectedly questioned. At a convention, mainly anti-mentalistically minded, of the Linguistic Society several years ago, heated objections were made against an attempt of mine to distinguish between Fr. vous ne pouvez pas discuter avec un fou and on ne peut pas ..., between Eng. you can't take it with you and one can't take it with one—on the basis of the greater ‘warmth of life’ of the first type. One of my opponents became visibly angry, and an eminent scholar who was present stated authoritatively and testily that, in his usage of the indefinite pronouns, and in the usage he had observed, there is no difference whatsoever between one and you. So much is it true that mechanistic habits of mind blind the scholar to the most elementary facts of, and blunt in him the Sprachgefühl for, his own mother tongue. I assure Mr. Bloomfield that, on this occasion, I felt exactly about the ‘tertiary responses’ of fellow linguists as he feels about my own animadversions—rather in the mood of ‘Eppur si muove’.

⁴ It is simply not true to say that the avoidance of mentalistic terminology is no indication of a weakening of beliefs in man. In those periods when it became no longer fashionable to talk about God, this was a manifestation of ebbing faith; and this going underground of God encouraged the triumph of the Godless.

⁵ Not all the reactions indicted by Bloomfield as present in the ‘tertiary responses’ of laymen may be treated so clinically as he would make it appear: ‘The knowledge that the linguist has in person investigated the topic under discussion does not alter this response’ (the hostile one). Why should it not be that common sense, at times, may call scholars back to that reality which they are all too prone to sacrifice in their investigations? What has not been investigated by scholars laboring under wrong presuppositions? The reactions, for example, of the cultured public against the over-liberal attitude of linguists toward change (this charge has been levelled at the French linguists Bruṇot and Meillet by Boulenger and Therive in their fascinating books Les soirées du grammar-club and Le français langue morte?) and against the replacement in universities of ‘classical scholars in the old sense’ who spoke about concepts, by philologists, papyri readers, and robbers of tombs—this was healthy common sense.

⁶ Brother Spence in One Foot in Heaven is right in comparing the argument of an atheistic dentist against God ('you can't see him, you can't grasp him') to that of a man suffering from toothache who would contend that the abstract 'toothache' does not exist ('you can't see it, you can't grasp it'). A clear case of the 'revolt against language' is the following: When in a meeting of historians the speaker had shown that neither the leaders of the French revolution nor the modern historians have ever been in agreement about the definition of that movement the discussion culminated in the rhetorical question of one cheerful debater: ‘Was there any French revolution?‘

⁷ Mr. Bloomfield contends that anti-mentalistic lexicographers give definitions no different from those of mentalistic lexicographers; that they simply avoid, in their definitions, the phrase ‘the concept of’. I would say that this attitude is either hypocritical or disregardful of linguistic facts: either the mechanists want to avoid only the mentalistic word ‘concept’ while adopting its implications, or else they are going counter to the syntactic system of the language which distinguishes, for example, between ‘rain’ (a concept, and as such it is listed in all dictionaries) and ‘the rain, this rain’ etc.

⁸ According to the mechanists, speech occurs by trigger effects produced by speech habits. But any observation of human behavior shows that mechanization is only the second phase after a creative period; by what miracle have sound and meaning been joined in the first place? The goose-stepping of the German soldiers is certainly a most striking case of mechanization; but the conception of this drill was certainly a ‘creative’ act on the part of the German military staff.