At no time in human history has the need been more compelling to examine the processes and effects of linguistic communication. The rapid growth of the scope and power of press and radio, overcoming all barriers of time and distance, is bringing about an unprecedented transformation and control of human conduct. The effect of an unceasing barrage of emotive words, of battle-cries and slogans, on thought, feeling, behaviour and impulse has become dangerously profound. In the sphere of international politics alone it is urgent that the semantic, social and psychological problems inherent in the use of language be examined, and that understanding of them b e applied in international consultative bodies and tri'bunals; urgent if we are to hope for a more secure and more stable world, urgent if ever we are to achleve the rationale for peace.
Under the directing influence of political leaders, words have been designedly used (and manufactured) less to build than to destroy, less to create peace than to promote war. Research workers and teachers have more than the intellectual obligation to investigate and apply the social semantics of language.
The obligation is a moral one. There must be devotion to the problem if we are to help in making linguistic communication a means of diminishing or resolving conflict, and not as at present a means of increasing it. We cannot be tardy with this investigation. And paramount in this field of empirical study must be the sociologist. The sociologist has already contributed much to the development of general semantics. A. Gardiner rightly says in " T h e Theory of Speech and Language": "The science to which linguistic theory ultimately owes its allegience is neither logic nor psychology, but sociology". And sociology must contribute more; must intensify its several studies of social symbolization, (the symbolization reflected in law, in government, in ritual, in chess, in language) and integrate them to appreciate more fully the process and effects of