Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It

by Neil Postman

A guide to recognizing and correcting or eradicating confused, inappropriate, and inarticulate speech and unreasonable or maliciously intended speech

Genres: Linguistics, Communication, Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Education

269 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Neil Postman, an important American educator, media theorist and cultural critic was probably best known for his popular 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than four decades he was associated with New York University, where he created and led the Media Ecology program.

He is the author of more than thirty significant books on education, media criticism, and cultural change including Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The Disappearance of Childhood, Technopoly, and Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.

Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), a historical narrative which warns of a decline in the ability of our mass communications media to share serious ideas. Since television images replace the written word, Postman argues that television confounds serious issues by demeaning and undermining political discourse and by turning real, complex issues into superficial images, less about ideas and thoughts and more about entertainment. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only top-down information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He refers to the relationship between information and human response as the Information-action ratio.

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Postman's more famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death was a life changing experience for me. I recently put it in a list of five books that shaped me most as a person (the other four: Augustine's Confessions, Lewis's The Great Divorce, Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, and Walden). I recently heard two other people I like quite a bit enthusing over it.
And so, when I found this one in my basement, where it had been hibernating after I picked it up in a used book sale, I read it. And it was enjoyable and useful, and if I had great hopes of it being read widely and attentively, I might think it could change world politics.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

The postman always rings twice, in this case crazily and stupidly. This book is full of ponderings on how not to be an Eichmann and instead be a postman. So many semantics that there are not enough words to contain em'

[William Rhoden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was well written, and had great conclusions. Some of the interior arguments are not the strongest, but overall it was a good read.

[Monique Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

all of that schooling and we learned what? we learned how too talk really crazy and really stupid.

[Abdennasser Alaoui · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Neil Postman’s own words:

This is a book about talk… the kind which I think it useful and virtuous to expose as crazy or stupid.

1. Stupid talk is talk that has a confused direction or an inappropriate tone or a vocabulary not well-suited to its context. It is talk that does not and cannot achieve its purposes.

2. Crazy talk is talk that may be entirely effective but which has unreasonable or evil or, sometimes, overwhelmingly trivial purposes. It is talk that creates an irrational context for itself or sustains an irrational conception of human interaction.

END OF QUOTE.

Postman’s analysis of crazy and stupid talk is influenced by people like the founder of general semantics Alfred Korzybski, the founder of modern philosophy of science Karl Popper, George Herbert Mead, I.A. Richards, George Orwell, Lewis Mumford, Wendell Johnson, and Saul Alinsky.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Postman's book about semantics is stimulating and fun to read, but I'm not totally satisfied with it. I cannot share some of Postman's assumptions which seem to elevate reason above all other faculties. Nonetheless, he is excellent in identifying why so much of our talk fails and I learned a lot from this about being more aware of semantic environments. Like the other Postman books I've read, Postman is best at identifying the problems and helping us to think more critically, but his ultimate solution (which occupies only the last twenty pages of this book) falls a little flat for me.

[Catarina Diniz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I book I would undoubtedly recomend to every humam being. Having read it in the midst of the US election I found it even more relevant. I think the author does a wonderful job on analyzing language and communication without patronizing the reader. It does use jardon from the communication and linguistic field that common readers like myself could find hard to understand however it makes a great job of explaining the concepts in a simple matter before elaburating on them.
Overall a great book

[Nando · Rating 5 out of 5]

Progenitor to what became cognitive-behavioral psychology, although Neil would disagree with me. Read it and learn about how your thinking can alter your experiences.