Woulda Coulda Shoulda

From Menletter September 2007

By Tim Baehr

Snow by Any Other Name

It's almost a cliché by now: The Inuit have nine (or fifteen) names for "snow," and this fact proves that language determines our perception. Another example of this linguistic determinism is in the perception of the rainbow. We all know (here in the western world) that the colors of the rainbow can be remembered by the name Roy G. Biv - that is, the sequence of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. And we see the seven bands in the sky after many rainstorms. The rainbow spectrum, however, is actually continuous. We see seven bands because we have seven words for those colors. Speakers of some other languages may see only three or four bands, depending on how many words they have for the primary colors.

Linguistic determinism has many proponents and detractors, and research continues today in cognitive psychology labs over half a century after Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf lent their names to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the most well-known way linguistic determinism is expressed.

Similar to Sapir-Whorf is the idea that how we think and act is determined, or at least influenced, by the grammar and vocabulary we use to describe ourselves and our lives. The psychologists call this "self-talk," and it's apparently a popular topic; a Google search yields nearly 800,000 hits for this phrase.

Talking To Ourselves

Self-talk can be positive or negative. The negative stuff keeps us stuck in endless loops of failure and misery. The positive stuff is supposed to energize our lives and lead to success. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoons, tells of writing a note every day consisting of a specific goal, something like "I will have Dilbert appearing in 135 newspapers." When he reached that goal, he upped the number.

Negative self-talk seems, for many of us men, a natural baseline. We're not all abject failures, but we often don't feel very good about ourselves and how our lives are going. I'm reminded of Marlon Brando's lines in On the Waterfront, leading up to the famous "I coulda been a contender":

Charlie: Look, kid, I - how much you weigh, son? When you weighed one hundred and sixty-eight pounds you were beautiful. You coulda been another Billy Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast.

Terry: It wasn't him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, "Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson." You remember that? "This ain't your night"! My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money.

Charlie: Oh I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.

Terry: You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charley.

Go back through Terry's (Brando's) speeches and you'll find a trio of the words we often use to do ourselves immense damage: "could," "would," and "should."

Terry uses variations on these words to explain his current state (he's a bum). He expresses no hope for the future. He's done, and his words seal his fate.

Enter the Linguist

Why is this so? What is it about the meaning and grammar of these words that influence (or even determine) Terry's and our perception of our lot in life?

"Could," "would," and "should" are called "modals." They work with a main verb to mark the conditional tense (or conditional mood) in English. The conditional mood is used to express conditions that are hypothetical or contrary to fact. Terry "coulda been a contender," but he wasn't.

One fascinating aspect of these modals is that, grammatically, they are the past tense of three other modals: "can," "will," and "shall." The present-tense forms are used to predict events in the future ("I can/will/shall do it tomorrow."). So the past-tense forms might be called, ironically, the "past future."

Terry went back through time to "predict," retroactively, his current state. Like Terry, we often reach into the past and make predictions that explain our current and often sorry state. We thereby let ourselves off the hook. And very often we don't have a Charlie to talk to; we talk to ourselves. "I should have been kinder." "She wouldn't treat me that way if. . . ." "I would be rich by now if only. . . ." "I coulda been a contender (or famous surgeon or brilliant writer, or . . .)." It's a quiet, insistent, nagging voice, isn't it?

What kind of time warp is this? How many of us travel back in the "Woulda coulda shoulda" machine, not to change the present but simply to give our present misery a sense of inevitability? In other words, how many of us use one particular linguistic structure to allow ourselves to wallow in regret? Apparently a lot of us: An exact-phrase Google search of "woulda coulda shoulda" yields nearly 200,000 responses. Time travel is apparently easier than staying in the present and dealing with our current situation.

Accentuating the Positive

What happens when we use language, especially in the stories we tell and predictions we make about ourselves, to create a better future? Many books and websites propound some kind of positive self-talk, and some of them may actually be helpful. Others sound like New Age happy-talk, mildly to profoundly irritating. Do we have to slog through an entire book or website to find out anything truly useful?

What if we kept things really simple and started remembering to use the present-tense forms: I can, I will, I shall. Even in rehashing past defeats, these phrases can be healing and powerful. I screwed up. I can do better than that; in fact, I can remember doing better in other situations. I will be better prepared next time. I shall start planning now.

Can we influence, or even determine, the path of our lives by adopting three simple words? Let's try.