R: Well, I suppose in the old days (in the time of The Meaning of Meaning) one was concerned to modernize the theory of knowledge, and we (Ogden and I) outraged everybody by saying that really what you were talking about was only connected with what you said by a complex casual relation. That was scandalous in 1919. It became commonplace as time went on. . . .

So much for the referential use of language. Against it in those days we set up a thing called the emotive use of language. (We inherited the word "emotive;" I think it was Marty who launched it.) What we tried to say has often been misunderstood. . . . The referential use of language is the job of leading people to think about certain things--about this rather than about that--and to think in this sort of way rather than in that way. Reference is your main instrument for influencing people. You can also do it other ways. . . .

I: How did Basic English get started?

R: It was an extraordinary piece of virtuosity on the part of Ogden. I can't imagine Basic English or any of its derivatives having come into existence without this peculiar thing. Ogden was a very good scholar, good enough for a chair in the classics and destined for one--but he was interested in too many other things, in everything else, in fact.

One of the magical gifts he had was his capacity to rephrase almost anything. At one time he thought of launching himself as a sort of Universal Re-phraser for anyone who found difficulty in putting his ideas into words. The draft Prospectus ran: "You have the Ideas," "We have the Words." It wouldn't have been true that they had the ideas, but certainly Ogden had enough of both. And he created Basic English by interrogating his intelligent friends; he had hundreds of them; he belonged to seven Clubs, at least, and could contrive not to be a club bore.

He was very, very witty, a most unexpected, surprising man. He'd take off with anyone he thought knew all about X and keep him up to three o'clock in the morning. By that time he'd found out what he wanted to know about X and he could use it. What he was finding out was which words one couldn't do without, and he worked away on which words one can do without. If you can substitute a phrase of ten words for a given word, however technical and abstruse, then you can do without it. That was one of his rough working rules.

There's a wonderful book called the General Basic English Dictionary in which more than 20,000 words are defined in Ogden's Basic 850. The definitions, if anyone compares them with the pocket Oxford dictionary, are of about the same scope. They had to beat the pocket Oxford. That was his test.

I: When did television become an important part of your design for escape?

R: About the middle of the war, '42 or '43. It looked like the heaven-sent instrument. You could put pictures along with words and sentences. If you can get the eye and ear cooperating, you can do anything, I think. Television looked like the divinely appointed medium. So I got a little grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and I went to Walt Disney's studio to learn how to make cartoons.

I had taken to drawing before that and their artists were very helpful. The great thing to do is to develop a kind of universal simplified pictorial script in which you can express situations. And then you must put sentences and pictures that correspond to their meanings in certain sequences together.

I still think that T.V. or satellite-distributed sentence-situation-depiction games are going to be the way to educate the planet. There's more power to the eye and ear together than to either of them apart. . . .

I: Do you foresee any means of overcoming the intransigence of the communications media, especially considering the critical need for mass education in Africa and India?

R: Much can be done if things get bad enough. Things are going to get really bad rather soon, and so I'm hopeful. It's just like a war. When you get a really bad war (I don't mean a remote war, I mean a home-threat war) people start doing things they had said were impossible. I think there's going to be a world crisis quite soon: we must hope it won't take the from of mutual murder all 'round the planet, but there's going to be a crisis.

There are local crises almost everywhere you look and getting worse all the time. When things are bad enough you have to do the impossible or be fired and have another man come in. Impossible had to be done all through both the Wars. The great thing during those Wars was to get rid of the people who were supposed to know better.

I: You spent a number of years teaching in China. In view of your experiences there and the current anti-Western attitude of the Chinese, do you think a concept like Basic English would be tolerated by them?