ABSTRACT
Social workers, who are so largely dependent on language, should have given little attention to words and to what it means to speak a language. Their activity has been described as the attempt to cure through talk, and their case records contain in summary or verbatim form accounts of innumerable conversations with their clients. A significant part of social work training seems to consist in the correct appreciation of a group of key terms, such as 'acceptance', 'self-determination' and so on, and the literature of social work seems concerned to repeat a particular verbal tradition. Many social work writers seem to experience language as an external force which distorts social work activity. The idea that language is dispensable, and perhaps that it ought sometimes to be dispensed with in favour of some kind of communication through feeling, also detracts from the important role social work can play in the task of describing feelings.
