Definitions are developed in various ways. For convenience we consider these techniques one at a time. However, they do not exclude one another, and in practice they are often combined.
Defining by Genus-Species
This is one of the most common means of definition. The entity or word being defined (called the definiendum) is first set into its genus (class) and then distinguished from other members of that class:
History is the recital of facts given as true, in contradistinction to the fable, which is the recital of facts given as false. Voltaire
Voltaire begins by setting "history" (the thing, not the word) into the genus "recital of facts." Then he differentiates it from the other member of that class, "fable."
The bulk of a genus-species definition usually goes to dif- ferentiation. This may be done explicitly, as in Voltaire's case;
that is, you actually mention the other member(s) of the class and explain how the definiendum differs from them. Or it may be done implicitly, where you do not actually name the other member(s) of the class but simply describe the defini- endum so completely that it is, by implication, differentiated from them. Obviously a class of any size makes complete explicit differentiation impractical. If you were defining, say, football, it would take many, many pages to distinguish it from every other team sport.
However you differentiate the thing you are defining, you must be clear about which of its attributes are essential and which are not. For example, the fact that football is played in
(4) DEFINITION, ANALYSIS, AND QUALIFICATION 135
stadiums (usually outdoors) before large crowds is not essen- tial to its definition: baseball and soccer are also team sports played under similar conditions. On the other hand, the rules of football, the dimensions and the markings of the field, these facts are unique. Such essential attributes are what dis- tinguish a definiendum. But this does not mean that you should ignore incidental attributes altogether. If you were explaining football to a foreign friend, it would be important that he or she understand something about where and when it is played.
The following explanation of what a map is illustrates a genus-species definition:
A map is a conventional picture of an area of land, sea, or sky.
Perhaps the maps most widely used are the road maps given away by the oil companies. They show the cultural features such as states, towns, parks, and roads, especially paved roads. They show also natural features, such as rivers and lakes, and sometimes moun- tains. As simple maps, most automobile drivers have on various occasions used sketches drawn by service station men, or by friends, to show the best automobile route from one town to another.
The distinction usually made between "maps" and "charts" is that a chart is a representation of an area consisting chiefly of water;
a map represents an area that is predominantly land. It is easy to see how this distinction arose in the days when there was no nav- igation over land, but a truer distinction is that charts are specially designed for use in navigation, whether at sea or fn the air.
Maps have been used since the earliest civilizations, and ex- plorers find that they are used in rather simple civilizations at the present time by people who are accustomed to traveling. For ex- ample, Arctic explorers have obtained considerable help from maps of the coast lines showing settlements, drawn by Eskimo people.
Occasionally maps show not only the roads, but pictures of other features. One of the earliest such maps dates from about 1400 B.C.
It shows not only roads, but also lakes with fish, and a canal with crocodiles and a bridge over the canal. This is somewhat similar to the modern maps of a state which show for each large town some feature of interest or the chief products of that town. c. C. Wylie
I 3 6 THE EXPOSITORY PARAGRAPH
Wylie first places "map" in its genus ("a conventional pic- ture of an area of land, sea, or sky") and illustrates it ("road maps"). Next he distinguishes "map" from the other member of its class ("chart"). Finally, in the third paragraph, he gives us information about maps which, although not essential to the definition, is interesting and enlightening.
In working out a genus-species definition, then, the essen- tial questions to ask yourself are these:
To what class does it belong?
What unique qualities distinguish it from other members of that class?
What other qualities—even though not unique—are important if readers are fully to understand the word or thing?
Defining by Synonyms
A synonymous definition is simply explaining something in different words, usually simpler words. Synonyms are useful when you must use a term readers cannot reasonably be ex- pected to know:
Huge "pungs" (ox-or horse-drawn sledges), the connecting links between ocean commerce and New England farms, are drawn up in Dock Square three deep. . . . Samuel Eliot Morison The questions Mr. Murrow brought up will rise to plague us again because the answers given are not, as lawyers say, "responsive"—
they are not the permanent right answers, although they will do for the day. Gilbert Seldes
Synonyms are also helpful if you must use an everyday word in a special sense (what earlier we called a "stipulative definition"):
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word " l o v e " here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—
(4) DEFINITION, ANALYSIS, AND QUALIFICATION 137 not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James Baldwin
There is no sure guide to when you need to define a word.
Certainly a definition is called for when you use a technical term in a passage intended for nontechnical readers. Lawyers do not have to be told the legal sense of responsive, but the rest of us do. And a definition is needed when you use a common word in a special or personal sense, as Baldwin does with love. On the other hand, you waste time and insult read- ers by defining commonplace words used conventionally.
Defining by Illustration
Examples are valuable when you define, especially in dealing with abstractions. Heroism, for instance, is most easily ex- plained by illustrating heroic (and perhaps nonheroic) actions.
In the following paragraph an anthropologist is explaining to Americans what "self-respect" means to the Japanese. She contrasts the Japanese conception of the quality with the American.
The heart of her definition, however, lies in the examples of how the Japanese behave to maintain self-respect:
In any language the contexts in which people speak of losing or gaining self-respect throw a flood of light on their view of life. In Japan "respecting yourself" is always to show yourself the careful player. It does not mean, as it does in English usage, consciously conforming to a worthy standard of conduct—not truckling to an- other, not lying, not giving false testimony. In Japan self-respect (jicho) is literally "a self that is weighty," and its opposite is "a self that is light and floating." When a man says "You must respect yourself," it means, "You must be shrewd in estimating all the fac- tors involved in the situation and do nothing that will arouse criti- cism or lessen your chances of success." "Respecting yourself"
often implies exactly the opposite behavior from that which it means in the United States. An employee says, "I must respect
138 THE EXPOSITORY PARAGRAPH myself (jicho)," and it means, not that he must stand on his rights, but that he must say nothing to his employers that will get him into trouble. "You must respect yourself" had this same meaning, too, in political usage. It meant that a "person of weight" could not respect himself if he indulged in anything so rash as "dangerous thoughts." It had no implication, as it would in the United States, that even if thoughts are dangerous a man's self-respect requires that he think according to his own lights and his own conscience.
Ruth Benedict
Defining by Metaphor and Simile
Metaphors and similes, which draw a kind of comparison, sometimes help to clarify the meaning of a word or concept.
In a famous passage, the seventeenth-century Anglican cler- gyman Jeremy Taylor defined prayer using a series of meta- phors, which culminated in the image of a lark:
Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation, the rest of our cares, and the calm of our tempest; prayer is the issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts, it is the daughter of charity and the sister of meekness; and he that prays to God with an angry, that is, with a troubled and discomposed spirit, is like him that retires into a battle to meditate, and sets up his closet in the outquarters of an army, and chooses a frontier-garrison to be wise in. Anger is a per- fect alienation of the mind from prayer, and therefore is contrary to that attention which presents our prayers in a right line to God. For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring up- wards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and unconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of his wings:
till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below.
(4) DEFINITION, ANALYSIS, AND QUALIFICATION 139
Defining by Negatives .
Negative definition tells us what something is not. Thus in the passage below miserliness is defined in terms of its an- tithesis, thrift:
Thrift by derivation means thriving; and the miser is the man who does not thrive. The whole meaning of thrift is making the most of everything; and the miser does not make anything of anything. He is the man in whom the process, from the seed to the crop, stops at the intermediate mechanical stage of the money. He does not grow things to feed men; not even to feed one man; not even to feed himself. The miser is the man who starves himself, and every- body else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form. G. K. Chesterton
Paired or Field Definition
Occasionally the sense of one word or concept is intimately tied to that of a second (or of several) so that the terms can be defined only by reference to one another. Such words com- prise a field of meaning; for example, think of the titles des- ignating commissioned rank in the United States Army: cap- tain cannot be understood without reference to first lieutenant and major—the ranks on either side—and these in turn imply second lieutenant and lieutenant colonel and so on through the entire series of grades. In this paragraph a scholar defines the two kinds of source material available to histori- ans:
Written and oral sources are divided into two kinds: primary and secondary. A primary source is the testimony of an eyewitness, or of a witness by any other of the senses, or of a mechanical device like the dictaphone—that is, of one who or that which was present at the events of which he or it tells (hereafter called simply eye- witness). A secondary source is the testimony of anyone who is not an eyewitness—that is, of one who was not present at the events of which he tells. A primary source must thus have been produced by a contemporary of the events it narrates. It does not, however,
140 THE EXPOSITORY PARAGRAPH need to be original in the legal sense of the word original—that is, the very document (usually the first written draft) whose contents are the subject of discussion—for quite often a later copy or a printed edition will do just as well; and in the case of the Greek and Roman classics seldom are any but later copies available.
Louis Gottschalk
Defining by Etymology and Semantic History
Another way of getting at the meaning of a word is through its root meaning (the etymology) and the changes that mean- ing has undergone (the semantic history). In the following paragraph the concept of a university is defined by returning to an older name for the institution and exploring the impli- cations of the term:
If I were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as I could, what a University was, I should draw my answer from its ancient des- ignation of a Studium Generate or "School of Universal Learning."
This description implies the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot;—from all parts; else, how will you find professors and students for every department of knowledge? and in one spot, else, how can there be any school at all? Accordingly, in its simple and rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every kind, con- sisting of teachers and learners from every quarter. Many things are requisite to complete and satisfy the idea embodied in this descrip- tion; but such as this a university seems to be in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country.
John Henry Newman
While relatively easy, using etymologies and older mean- ings has limitations. You must use dictionaries cautiously.
The etymology of a word is not necessarily its "proper"
sense. Word meanings change and it cannot be argued that the contemporary sense of a word is somehow wrong because it has strayed from the original. Nor do dictionary definitions tell the whole story. No matter how sensitive and thorough, they have to exclude many subtleties of meaning.
(4) DEFINITION, ANALYSIS, AND QUALIFICATION 141