AFTER a visit from a friend, my mother would review the conversation in her mind, the pauses, inflections and choice of words, then announce the real news the caller mentioned:
“Henry wants to sell his house.’’ “Frank is going to marry janie.’’ “Young Mrs. Cole think she’s pregnant but isn’t sure.’’
Mother was no mind reader, she was pregticing a teahnique we now call “content analysis.’’ It’s a kind of systematic search for the smallverbal clues that, when put together, reveal a larger meaning: attitudes, intentions, behavior patterns, underlying strategy. As Ben jonson wrote more than 300 years ago, “Language springs out of the inmost parts of us. No glass renders a man’s likeness so true as his speech.”
Experts in business and science use highly developed content-analysis techniques to measure changes in consumer attitudes and to diagnose emotional conflicts. Governments keep corps of analysts monitoring other nations’ broadcasts and printed materials to extract useful intelligence. I’ve found- as have many other people- that
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