Words change the world in three “basic” ways: taming, framing and naming. At least, that’s what New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik told listeners during the English department’s annual Munro Beattie Lecture, March 12.
“How is it that we use language, organize language to alter our emotions and express our ideas?” Gopnik asked.
The answer was one a number of undergraduates, graduates, faculty, alumni, and interested Ottawans crowded into the lecture hall to hear.
Drawing on vivid examples from three of Gopnik’s own books and Darwin’s work, Gopnik described how Darwin “tamed” words.
“Darwin had to take an idea that seemed potentially scary and subversive sound as sane and straightforward as he believed it to be,” said Gopnik, who has been writing for the New Yorker magazine since 1986.
To talk about how the world is changed by “framing,” he used his book The Table Comes First as an example. To illustrate his point, he spoke about how “words change our perception of wine.” As he said, “one of the amazing things about the experience of wine-tasting is how utterly vulnerable it is to the things we say about it.”
Gopnik suggested that even the sensory exercise of wine-tasting is affected by the expectation – by the way it is “framed.”
Finally, Gopnik spoke about his most recent novel Winter: Five Windows on the Season to discuss how words change the world by “naming.”
This was the most basic of the three ways – the exercise of naming something creates order in a world that is, otherwise, “indifferent,” he said.
“Armed with that hope, we see not waste and cold, but light and mystery and wonder and a thing called Christmas and another thing called January,” he said.
Part of what drew the New Yorker writer to Carleton was the history of the Munro Beattie lectures themselves.
The series started in 1985 as a tribute to the English department’s founding chair, and Gopnik said he wanted to “talk a little bit about what [he] can only call an English department subject.”
“This is very much a lecture devoted to a great professor or English, as my dad was a wonderful professor of English,” Gopnik said.
