Why So Much Is Beyond Words

By Frank Trippett

"In the beginning," says the Gospel of St. John, "was the I Word." The mystical meanings that the Bible lays upon the word Word are not embraced by everyone. Yet nobody can reasonably doubt that the coming of the word, if not the Word, to humankind was the start of something big in history. Human talk may have struck dyspeptic Nathaniel Hawthorne like "the croak and cackle of fowls," but the rise of language, written and spoken, is all but universally rated as one of the glories of the species. What is surprising is that in the common give and take of daily living people still rely so little upon the verbal language that distinguishes them from the beasts.

In fact, Homo sapiens, as a communicator, does not seem to have come all that far from the time when grunts and gesticulations were the main ways of getting messages across. Both individuals and groups still send vital messages by gesture, by pantomime, by dramatics--by a dizzy diversity of what scholars call nonverbal communication. The reality is easy to overlook in an epoch that is bloated with pride in its dazzling technical marvels of communication. Yet, in spite of human garrulousness, perhaps as little as 20% of the communication among people is verbal, according to experts; most, by far, even when talk is going on, consists of nonverbal signals.

This is true of men, women, children, individually and in groups of all sizes. Nations and the realm of politics lean heavily on indirect gesture and charades to convey important messages. Take Secretary of State Alexander Haig's talks in China: Was not his actual purpose to send a signal to the Soviets? Societies signal prevalent values to their members by what is applauded and what condemned; status symbol is synonymous with status signal. "Language," said Samuel Johnson, "is the dress of thought." But all over the world people act as though language were mere costume--and usually a disguise. Everybody (evidently nobody can help it) tends to mimic that anonymous signaler cited in Proverbs: "He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teacheth with his fingers."

This tendency to commune by semaphore has probably not increased at all in centuries, but consciousness of it surely has. A spate of books like this season's Reading Faces and last decade's popular Body Language have explored the individual's tendency to broadcast things (unconsciously and otherwise) through all manner of physical movement and facial gymnastics. Such matters, made widely familiar by pop sociology, anthropology and psychology, have become the stuff of common conversation. Michael Korda's Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, like other books of this ilk, is mainly a primer in how to manipulate others by a cold-blooded control of nonverbal signals that occur commonly in the workaday world: for example, how executives signal their style and presumptions of power by the clothes they choose and the way they arrange their office furniture.

At work or play, everybody emits wordless signals of infinite variety. Overt, like a warm smile. Spontaneous, like a raised eyebrow. Involuntary, like leaning away from a salesperson to resist a deal. Says Julius Fast in Body Language: "We rub our noses for puzzlement. We clasp our arms to isolate ourselves or to protect ourselves. We shrug our shoulders for indifference." Baseball pitchers often dust back a batter with a close ball that is not intended to hit but only to signal a warning claim of dominance. The twitchings of young children too long in adult company are merely involuntary signals of short-fused patience. Any competent psychiatrist remains alert to the tics and quirky expressions by which a patient's hidden emotions make themselves known. People even signal by the odors they give off, as Janet Hopson documents in superfluous detail in Scent Signals: The Silent Language of Sex. Actually, it is impossible for an individual to avoid signaling other people; the person who mutely withdraws from human intercourse sends out an unmistakable signal in the form of utter silence.

Sociologist Dane Archer calls reading such signals "social intelligence," but the phrase's greatest usefulness was probably in completing the title of his book How to Expand Your Social Intelligence Quotient. Urged Archer: "We must unshackle ourselves from the tendency to ignore silent behavior and to prefer words over everything else." The evidence all over is that while people meander the earth through thickets of verbiage (theirs and others), many, perhaps most, do pay more attention to wordless signals and are more likely to be influenced and governed by nonverbal messages.

Nothing but the daily news is necessary to show the reliance that rulers and nations place upon nonverbal communication. Presidents soon learn that they can hardly do anything that is not taken to be a signal of some sort to somebody. So it is, too, with the governments under them. In March President Reagan, questioned about lifting the post-Afghanistan embargo on grain sales to the U.S.S.R., told reporters that he did not see how he could do it "without sending the wrong signal" --which is exactly what critics accused him of when he did kill the embargo the next month. Why did the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reject Ernest Lefever as the nation's top human rights official? Partly because of a fear that other countries might construe support of Lefever as a signal of national sympathy for his unenthusiastic attitude toward a strong American human rights policy. Why do some defense strategists support building the MX missile at a cost of about $40 billion? Not entirely because of its possible military efficacy, but also because of what a commitment to such a system might signal the Soviet Union about U.S. resolve.

The bloody history of the world ought to be the first item of evidence in any case against relying on wordless signaling in international affairs. The opportunities for misunderstanding are immense and constant. Says Harvard Law Professor Roger Fisher, a specialist in international negotiations: "The chances of properly understanding signals in the midst of conflict is always very slight." For instance, during the Iran hostage negotiations, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, intending to signal the belief that U.S.-Iran problems could be resolved, spoke of restoring "normal" diplomatic relations. Iran mistakenly took that to mean a return to things as they were under the despised Shah. Says Fisher: "Sending diplomatic signals is like sending smoke signals in a high wind."

As all but the very luckiest--or dullest--of people might testify, individual signals have a way of misfiring just as easily, with results just as calamitous if not as earthshaking. The danger of misunderstanding increases dramatically when even the most elementary signals are used by people in different cultures. The happiest of overt American signals, the circled thumb and index finger, unless accompanied by a smile, amounts to an insult in France. The innocent American habit of propping a foot on a table or crossing a leg in figure-four style could cause hard feelings among Arabs, to whom the showing of a shoe sole is offensive.

People indulge in nonverbal communication not basically to be clever or devious but because these ways of communicating are deeply embedded in the habits of the species and automatically transmitted by all cultures. So says Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell, a pioneer in the study of kinesics, as body language is called. Other experts point out that signaling by movement occurred among lizards and birds, as well as other creatures, even before mammals emerged.

Unfortunately, no useful dictionary of gestures is really possible, since every gesture and nonverbal expression depends for meaning on the variants of both the individual using it and the culture in which it takes place. Says Anthropologist Edward T. Hall, author of The Silent Language and Beyond Culture: "Because of its complexity, efforts to isolate out 'bits' of nonverbal communication and generalize from them in isolation are doomed to failure. Book titles such as How to Read a Person Like a Book are thoroughly misleading, doubly so because they are designed to satisfy the public's need for highly specific answers to complex questions for which there are no simple answers."

Sooner or later, for any word lover, the human habit of wordless signaling leads to a simple question for which there is perhaps only a complex answer. The question is why has language, given its unique power to convey thought or feeling or almost anything else in the human realm, fallen so short as a practical social tool for man. The answer is that it has not. Instead, the human creature has fallen short as a user of language, employing it so duplicitously that even in ancient times the wise advised that people should be judged not by what they said but by what they did. That such advice holds good for today goes, alas, without saying. --By Frank Trippett

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