A dark wood (allusion)
A dark wood is an allusion that describes our ignorance about the nature of a language. When the author worked on this book, he felt as if he was lost. There were “nothing more than a few trails blazed through dark-wood, mostly dead-ended.” It was “very dark indeed,” for it took him twenty years to finish the research. Though this work “established no more” than there was “such a wood,” the author did believe that it was “worthwhile.” The main reason of it was that it was inexplicably interesting to look at the language from “a different direction.”
A Martian (symbol)
A Martian is a symbol of a clear and unbiased vision, even naivety. Pope said, “the proper study of man is man.” Our main problem is that there are too many scientific branches that study different aspects of a human’s life, but there is none that would encompass all that knowledge. For instance, “ethologists and anthropologists” study “man’s culture and evolution.” “Linguists” study languages. Psychologists study “stimuli and responses.” Ethologists study those “drives and instincts man shares with other creatures.” Obviously, “only a Martian” can see man “as he is, because man is too close too himself and his vision too fragmented.”
Looking for answers (motif)
The author of the book has many questions, but the problem is that he can’t find the right answers. That is the reason why he decides to investigate two things: “man’s strange behavior” and “man’s strange gift of language,” for he believes that “understanding the latter” might help in “understanding the former.” It is an attempt “to sketch” the beginnings of “a theory of a man for a new age,” “the sort of crude guess a visitor from Mars might make” if he landed on earth and “spent a year observing man and the beasts.”
