Faculty Profile

"It takes only 400 words of Basic English to run a battleship. With 850 words you can run the planet," mused Professor I. A. Richards, literary critie, lecturer in Humanities 1a, and one of Harvard's hardest-hitting opponents of scholarship in-a-vacuum. "Do you know that of the 22 hundred million people in the world, 15 hundred million don't read at all, or read a script which doesn't use an alphabet?" he went on, in a tone of bitterness and shock which made it plain that his fight against illiteracy and incomplete communication is a root fact of his life.

Out of this fight has come Basic English, Gloalingo, or arrant linguistic imperialism, depending on whether Richards. Time magazine, or an irreconcilable Anglophobe is speaking. At any rate, Basic English is undeniably (and amazingly) the reduction of English to 850 basic words through which any thought can be expressed. It is in addition the end-product of a voyage of discovery which has taken Professor Richards around the world, and from a painstaking consideration of the meaning of meaning itself to cartoon work with Disney.

This has been a strange dislocation and transformation for a man who was once nicely settled in Cambridge University as a teacher of philosophy with a passion for mountain climbing. Two things, however, failed to fit into this picture: his acute intelligence, which made him suspect that often the greatest philosophers don't make sense; and his conscience, which wouldn't rest till he found out why they failed to make sense. C. K. Ogden was then at Cambridge, and interested in the treacheries of the language, and together he and Professor Richards probed the question. Their findings were set forth in 1923 in "The Meaning of Meaning"; the now famous book on semantics. Ogden and Richards had found that many of even the most formidable intellects were forgetting an important thing-that the label or name of an object is not the object itself. Professor Richards shudders at so blunt and naive a formulation, and would rather put it that "the forms of language over-influence the forms of thought." Which meant that many philosophers were mistaking the word for the thing, communicating their meaning imperfectly, and in short often didn't know what the hell they were talking about. Ogden and Richards were then able to carry through that admirable work of distillation called Basic, and to explore its possibilities as a weapon against illiteracy, and as a new lingua franca. "Every time the Powers meet, the need for a universal language is emphasized," Professor Richards points out.

Those who have seen the defeat of the spirit caused by illiteracy among immigrants or our pitifully defiant Armed Forces illiterates have hailed Richards' work on human grounds alone. But any suspicion of his activities as fuzzy intellectualism was banished during the war when jutting-jawed, pragmatic military men beat a path to his Peabody House office, asking for aid. In one ease Richards and a small staff, in a whirl of activity, taught 1000 Chinese naval officers enough Basic English to operate a ship-in six weeks. Here he also made films with Disney for use in Armed Forces classes for illiterates.

Though his life has to a large degree been concerned with Basic, Professor Richards is the author of "Foundations of Esthetes." "Practical Criticism," and "Meneins on the Mind." He is no mean mountain climber, and in 1937, 10 years after their marriage, he and his wife were the first to seale Dent Blanche, in the Alps--a feat that was duplicated only years later, and then by a professional-led group.

Such an all-around background has given him a balanced view even of Basic English. He laughs off the nation that he wants to force anyone, including himself, to speak only Basic. "It's too dull!" he exclaims. "You can't swear in it."