Muller: "Some questions about the peculiar problems of communication today"

From "Some questions about the peculiar problems of communication today"
by HERBERT J. MULLER

Here I pause to raise a disagreeable question, suggested by the late Igor Stravinsky's unkind definition of linguists as men who know everything about language except how to use it. My own unfortunately limited knowledge of linguistics is due not only to the specialized voca- bulary and techniques one has to master, but the addiction to such jargon as "the emission of linguistic units," which I suppose means speech. Now that we have a growing number of technical specialists in problems of communication, the rude question is: How effectively do they communicate? At conferences they appear to do so well enough with one another, if with some occasional difficulty because of their dif- ferent specialties, but what about the educated general reader? Do they interest him, or reach him at all? I should confess to a possible bias in favor of this general reader, since he has got most of my books into paperback editions and bought a lot of copies, yet I do think that as a type he is a very important fellow. We have to depend on him if there is to be any hope of widely disseminating knowledge and thought that seem important to us, or of improving communication in our society. 

In COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

Google offers no citation for the alleged Stravinsky quotation.