ABSTRACT
In an introductory course in sociology the students quickly learn a vocabulary designed to identify simple forms of social life. One learns the sociological jargon of encounters, roles, positions, ranks, groups, organizations, norms, and attitudes. This chapter reveals that various combinations of executive descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions forms a minimum vocabulary of mundane sociology. Executive descriptions are particularly common in scientific discourse: definitions, laws, accounts of experimental apparatus. Emotive descriptions abound in artistic discourse: paintings, sculpture, poetry. Emotive evaluations are particularly common in religious discourse: sin, salvation, and the heavenly afterlife. The ability to manipulate communications—combining them into new ideas, adjusting them to new situations, relating them to themes—varies, of course, from individual to individual, depending on heredity and training; it constitutes what in a broad sense is called intelligence. Networks and organizations have complex interrelations. Within the framework of any large decentralized organization one may find islands that are networks.
