What Are Words For?

Tell me you didn't just say that -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
I'm reading To Kill A Mockingbird, and of course the book is an excellent read. (Review is forthcoming). The setting is Maycombe, Alabama in the 1930's. The book overflows with the N-word, and even characters sympathetic to the Finch family and the black defendant use the N-word. It has me thinking about how bad epithets evolve and develop social restrictions over the years. The words that come to mind now are the N-, B-, and F- bombs: nigger, bitch and fag. Yet another term flirts with banishment, but not just yet: Jew.

The terms can be bandied about liberally within the target group. Blacks will use the N-word liberally between themselves, even as a form of empowerment. Gays will use the F-word with riotous abandon, but if a straight person says it he will be punished with a stale dessert and a bad hair-do. The B-word has such powers that women don't really even use it with each other unless they want a hair-pulling catfight. A woman will use the B-word for a woman who is absent from the room. Coming from a man (and depending on the circumstances) the B-word is pretty much a declaration of war, or a cessation of future relations. Such is the power of a word -- and destructive power at that.

The word "Jew" has for some reason taken a negative connation, particularly used as an adjective or verb. People may opt for "Jewish", "Israeli", "practices Judaism" and other workarounds because the word itself seems somehow accusatory or racist. It should have no bad connotation, but these words only have destructive powers because of the nasty tone with which they've been delivered over the years. There are words that used to shock but have somehow gone mainstream and have mostly camp appeal nowadays: whore, slut, queer and darkie to name a few. Whore, slut and darkie reflect faded, antiquated values (by 21st century "humanist" standards anyhow). Queer has been resurrected as a valid synonym for odd and has even made its way into TV titles.

The preschool saying is, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". Words not only have the power to hurt -- they can cause wars and embargos. The King of Spain recently told Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to "Shut up". Because of this impolitic exchange, Venezuela is threatening to cut off Spain from its fiscal dealings. You can say that someone is too sensitive and it doesn't matter. If you say something thoughtlessly, you'll be composing your apology the very next day. If you deliberately toss out one of the "bomb" words above, you've lit a fuse as surely as if you were a pyromaniac. Get ready for an explosion.

I think the words have ugliness, not at all because of the target groups but rather the ugliness of the speaker's mentality. Ugly is as ugly does; nothing reflects ugly like ugly words. In You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks' character says that he has the gift of a savage tongue. He follows by saying he has a profound sense of depression each time he uses it as a weapon. We shouldn't water down what we have to say -- political correctness is a mire to avoid at the other extreme. But by according other people their basic dignity and refraining from nastiness, we garner much dignity for ourselves. Funny how it works out that way.

© 2007 blogSpotter

The Word Elf

An elf, pondering the irony of words -- Illustration courtesy Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I've always enjoyed words. They can be employed by writers and poets much as an artist uses crayons or pastels. A crayon has primarily one attribute to offer, color. A word has so many facets -- denotation, connotation, weight, cadence, source, and alternate shades of meaning. There are some words in English (surely other languages too) that have ironic, almost amazing second meanings. I've wondered if it's purely coincidence, or if some little sprite is at work in the mind of wordsmiths. I'll start with two trivial examples, where a word can be an antonym to itself:

oversight - (1) Act of error or omission (2) Act of careful observation and direction
cleave - (1) To hold tightly or adhere (2) To split or rend in two

How funny, that we can originate a word, this basic molecule of communication, and give it opposite meanings. Other words follow, that while not self-antonyms have amusing, maybe even eerie second meanings:

matter - (1) physical substance of the universe (2) A problem, an issue (3) Discharge from the eye (4) (verb) to figure as a significant factor
This word covers a gamut -- from deep philosophy to eye boogers. And a little more weird whimsy is added with the second meaning, "problem". Is the Word Elf up to no good again? Maybe this is coincidence, or maybe there's some deep-seated phenomenon that tethers these separate meanings to one word.

make-up - (1) Basic constitution (2) Facial cosmetics (3) Act of catching up, reparation or amends
On first appearance, the first two meanings are nearly antonyms -- or are they? The Word Elf is confounding us again with issues of meaning. Depending on context with the previous two words, you can be discussing deep physics or mascara that runs. "What is the make-up of matter" versus "What is the matter with your make-up?"

race - (1) A human subspecies or animal breed (2) A competition whose objective is to complete a goal or cross a finish line first
This one has some thought-provoking ironies (albeit racist in nature) although the two meanings have wholly separate origins, and finally met in an English noun of the same spelling. Perhaps the Word Elf is in actuality a Word Demon, and he is goading us with his trident.

I always thought that wordplay was purely the province of authors and poets -- not true, the more I observe. If you speak or write at all, your choice of words will carry your own thoughtful message -- and may be also laden with another cargo of what some nefarious wordsmith intended. The Word Elf, if he exists, is apparently fond of puns. They needn't be obvious or blunt -- sometimes subtle ironies are the most interesting.

© 2006 blogSpotter.

Genius Infant

How does he do it?

You're a genius and you probably didn't even know it. Every human with basic language skills has performed a feat of genius-level magnitude, without any awareness of having done so. The feat is so humdrum, so commonplace and yet so awesome. The feat of which I speak is an infant's learning to speak, by passive observation.

If you have a child in a crib, you may dangle stuffed animals in front of him, or read him nursery rhymes. He'll gain from these experiences, but he has a more influential ‘teacher’. By just passively listening to adult conversations, or listening to a TV in the background, the child's brain will absorb incredible volumes of data that Mother Goose never imagined. Let us consider some speech concepts, from simple to difficult: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, verb tense, conditional phrasing, and function words. Nouns are easy, the ultimate in concreteness. You dangle a puppy over the crib and say, “doggie” – the child can make an easy connection. Not so easy is what’s overheard. The child overhears the father ask the mother, "Janice did you get a chance to take the car in for a brake inspection". The child's brain is parsing the sounds as the father speaks; it can tell “a” and “chance” are two different words. It sorts the words by part of speech at some point.

The mathematics and inference skills required for the above are amazing to me. If you placed the adult me in a crib in Beijing, and all I did was overhear adult conversations, I would be dumb and mute with regards to the Chinese language. I would still be dumb and mute after 10 years of doing that. A child learns fluent speech well before Kindergarten – the ‘wunderkind’ effect is not the result of teachers or nursery rhymes. It’s the result of sitting and listening – and long naps for processing. What I envision is that the brain stores every sentence in some type of giant matrix. The Mother of all multi-linear programs must scan the sentences for common use and for frequently used words. It may even do more incredible things – like storing a picture of the scenario with each stored sentence. For example, the brain will make note of these two vocalizations:
Honey, would you like some more eggs?
These eggs are runny.

The brain will correlate a small, white cooked food item with the word ‘egg’. But the four year old child also has some mastery of verb tense and function words. These are abstract concepts – a P.H.D. in linguistics might struggle explaining these things. A four year old of average intelligence has implicitly and yet passively grasped the concept with no instruction at all. My other guess about this universal precocity is that the brain is somehow pre-wired with some type of “proto” language, already built in – and it is still nonetheless amazing. You might say, “I’ve done nothing brilliant since infancy.” That may be, but embrace the fact that for a fleeting part of early childhood, you had skills of abstraction and correlation that rival Einstein’s. We are geniuses, all.

I Get, I Run, I Do

Alphabet soup

I'd like to talk about something we all take for granted; it really gets no examination except by grade school teachers. I'm talking about the English language itself.

I've studied French for four years and Latin for two. Have always been struck by the fact that language is simultaneously a denotative conveyor of meaning, and also an artistic flow of verbal, poetic expressions. English is interesting, in that it's the bastard child of at least five different cultures: Old German, Latin, French, Scandinavian and Gaelic. It's interesting that an aspiring universalist, L. L. Zamenhof, created a whole new language called "Esperanto" at the end of the 19th century in hopes that it would be adopted as a universal language, much as was recently done with the Euro for continental currency. Turns out there's really no need for Esperanto, because English serves that purpose. English is the unholy alliance of Romance language and Germanic languages -- two strains that have seldom ever met or gotten along elsewhere.

What do I hate about English? Several things, most of them German in origin. We have too many irregular verbs, and they are the most commonly used ("to get", "to run", "to do"). We have too many words with silent consonants ("night", "should", "daughter","school"). We have too many words spelled alike but pronounced differently: "prove" vs "love". Or how about "bough" vs "enough" vs "cough" which was good for a comedy bit on "I Love Lucy". The German-based words tend to be harsh and guttural; they don't flow like music to the ears. Some very forward-thinking English monks and courtiers saw the messiness of all this several centuries in the past. They Latinized our alphabet and banished one German letter (representing the "th" sound I think). Along with French wine, they imported many French words too. Thank you, monks for all the bon mots!

What do I like about English? I do like the fact that it ties into so many other cultures. It's a grab bag of words from everywhere. I like the fact that compared to other Germanic languages, it has a few vowels between the consonants and you can speak or sing without harshness, without sounding like you want to invade Poland. When I buy new electronic gadgets, the instruction booklets frequently have the most common European languages. Interesting that I can nearly decipher Italian or Spanish; the German mystifies me completely. How can they need so many words for one simple thought? How can they cram that many consonants into one word? If you're German and reading this, you must have fluency in both and maybe you can explain it. But for now, I'll speak English and try to say "obtain" when I mean "get", because "obtain" is a prettier word.