No. Mr. Clinton has long realized that language does have a
systematic though complex relation to reality. His semantic arguments, if
ultimately unsuccessful, have shown an acute understanding of the logic and
psychology of language.
The world is analog; language is digital. A tape measure shows that
people's heights vary continuously, but when we talk about them, we face a
choice between ''tall'' and ''short.'' People who describe themselves as
''middle-aged,'' ''gray'' and ''wise'' cannot pinpoint the instant they
became so. Words are anchored to endpoints, but the continuum between them
may be up for grabs.
It would be fun to have Mr. Clinton in a graduate seminar on lexical
semantics. He suggested he was not ''alone'' with Monica Lewinsky because
people were in the Oval Office complex at the time. An intriguing point, but
none of us are marooned on an asteroid, since each of us shares the planet
with five billion others, none of us are ever unambiguously alone. Exactly
how far away, how inaudible or invisible or unnoticed, how thick the
barrier, before we are willing to say that someone is ''alone''?
At what point in the continuum of bodily contact -- from an accidental
brush in an elevator to tantric bliss -- do we say that ''sex'' has
occurred? How many times, how closely spaced, before it is ''sexual
relations'' or a ''sexual relationship''? When consenting adults come
together, does one of them ''cause'' contact, or are the actions of entities
with free will never truly caused?
The present tense -- ''Mary jogs,'' ''There is a unicorn in the garden''
-- is used for states that overlap with the moment of speaking. When an
action stretches over time, like standing or sitting, usage is
unproblematic. But when an action is more punctate, like swatting a fly or
having sex, present tense refers to a span of time in which the event is
habitual or repeated. If I say ''John is swatting flies,'' he doesn't have
to land a blow at the instant the words come out of my mouth.
Mr. Starr's lawyers accused Mr. Clinton of pedantically restricting
''there is sex'' to coitus when the President gave his deposition. Mr.
Clinton had a point when he replied that the present tense can refer to a
span of time over which acts tend to be repeated, and at that point he and
Ms. Lewinsky had broken up and were unlikely to have sex again. The
termination of a habitual state is inherently vague -- how much time must
elapse since the last cigarette before a would-be former smoker can say, ''I
don't smoke?''
Of course, these arguments don't impress anyone but a professor of
semantics, thanks to another key feature of language: people work around its
limitations by tacitly agreeing on how to use it. Conversation requires
cooperation. Listeners assume speakers are conveying information relevant to
what they already know and what they want to know. That allows them hear
between the lines in order to pin down the meanings of vague or ambiguous
words and to fill in the unsaid logical steps. When the shampoo bottle says
''Lather, rinse, repeat,'' we don't spend the rest of our lives in the
shower; we infer that it means ''repeat once.''
The expression ''to be on speaking terms'' reminds us that without
cooperation, language is impossible. The reason we cannot converse with our
computers is not that the engineers cannot program in the grammar and
vocabulary of the English language, but that they cannot program in the
common sense of a human speaker. In the old ''Get Smart'' television series,
Maxwell Smart asks the robot Hymie to ''give me a hand,'' and Hymie proceeds
to unscrew his hand and hold it out.
Mr. Clinton, of course, is not trying to impersonate Hymie. The
sketchiness of language gives the listener considerable leeway in pinning an
interpretation to an utterance. That is fine when the interlocutors are
cooperative -- and the listener's guess is the same as the speaker's intent
-- but not when they are adversaries and the interpretation can send someone
to jail.
The law requires language to do something for which it is badly designed:
leave nothing to the imagination. Lawmakers and lawyers do their best to
co-opt language for this unnatural job, but even their prolix definitions
and legalese inevitably leave room for alternate interpretations that a
clever adversary will find. The phrase ''the whole truth'' is meant to
pre-empt such cleverness, but taken literally the whole truth could include
one's complete autobiography, the history of the 20th century and so on, so
speakers are always entitled to be selective. At some point we have to fall
back on the principle of cooperation and judge the truthfulness of a
statement by what a cooperative speaker would expect his listeners to infer.
Mr. Clinton astutely said, ''My goal in this deposition was to be
truthful, but not particularly helpful.'' Unfortunately, when it comes to
the truth that listeners want, the very nature of human language makes this
goal impossible.
