AliceFraser
patreon
Some thoughts about language.
🕑 Added 2020-11-23 23:50:55 +0000 UTCI used to have an English professor who said “all language is quotation”. Which I loved.
He was a great professor. He’d come in with his lecture all written on scraps of paper and napkins, and speak in incredibly elegant and well constructed periods. I’d take notes at a mile a minute, and try to remember his neat dense turns of phrase to enjoy privately later.
If you think about how you learned the meaning of any word, particularly early on, you tend to have learned it by reference the objects or situations to which it applied.
Like, all the different things you saw that were blue - they were actually different shades of blue. Not the same thing at all... but you eventually learned the span of shades that can all be called blue. Which means your ‘inner blueness range’ is probably a few shades to the left or right of someone else’s ‘blue’ bracket.
And then you probably also learned that blue can be an emotional descriptor. And then the other more optional (?) layers of the meaning of the word blue. Political symbolism, as a euphemism for swearing, as a descriptor for a state of cookedness in steak.
But all language is like that; you learned it first by context, as a quotation. All language is a moving mass of meaning and association, shifting over time, and ideally it will have some overlap in understood meaning with the person you’re talking to.
Which brings me to my thought about comedy and rhetoric (all sorts of speech, really). Which is that there’s a great pleasure in a beautiful joke or turn of phrase. The pursuit of language is often trying to articulate something very precisely. But it’s important in my mind to remember that what you’re saying is essentially always just pointing in a direction. It’s gestural; impressionistic; a vague waving in a direction of a thought you’d quite like your audience to have.
Which is why live performance often feels more meaningful; because you can get the whole vibe and not just the words. It’s about tone and body language and the presence of emotion.
But of course, the whole point of civilisation is that words do have meaning. Or they should, or we have to all subscribe to the legal fiction that they do, or we’d all get nowhere. *
Xx
A
Speaking of speaking, I’ll see you lovely Afternoon Tea + level people at 8pm U.K. time, Tuesday 24 Nov (which is Aus 25th 7am) for the next salon.
P.S. as ever, do share this about if you like it. It helps.
* Trump is particularly good at a sort of borderline abstract painting of meaning; his vocabulary is incredibly limited, and his meanings lie less in the words themselves than the emotional directionality that they gesture towards. Very broad brushstrokes, all sweeping the attention in a particular direction. He leaves his suggestive, evocative sentences open with ellipses so people can fill in their own details and it’s very effective, particularly when seen as a whole performance. It’s also very easy to be confused about how he is so effective as a persuasive speaker if you only see him in short clips.
Comments
When I consider language, I think of translations of a word from one language to another. Most words have a universal understanding to the point that a word in English has a counterpart in German, Spanish, etc. But I am fascinated by word from other languages that have no reciprocal term in English. I wonder, do the speakers of that language somehow have a keener understanding of some concept than we English speakers? Apparently so, for we have no word whose meaning we can even misconstrue.
Your post reminded me of growing up with a dad, who as a psychologist and speech/language therapist, would marvel at the meaning of everyday words and objects (the more mundane the better) - their origins, their function and situation, and how we begin to give meaning through our own experiences and motivations. Through language we are attempting to make sense by constructing a commonality of understanding. One of his main interests was in helping those with speech and language dysfunction, both receptive and expressive, to develop other communication skills. Although not directly related, one of his lecture series was on the humble ‘hammer’, both the object and the word itself, linking its anthropological emergence, through its cultural and social contexts, to its material and figurative evolution. He would often challenge us kids to seek out and appreciate how and what things meant to us and may mean to others.
Martin Rodgers
I read somewhere that language requires/assumes shared knowledge and experience. I think that may be related to what you're saying. We refer to blue but our knowledge and experience of 'blueness' may differ, perhaps sometimes leading to confusion or misunderstanding, but we usually communicate regardless. There's also the qualia problem. “All language is quotation” is one of those wonderful lines, like “All art is lying”. Thanks.
That’s what I like about this platform! I get to air these ideas and then the loveliest people join the party to expand them with me.
Tony Liang
I speak as a person for whom English came as a second language after 12 years of Mandarin Chinese. That I prefer English, a language that I still and will forever struggle to master, is due to the precise imprecision of the language. Your description of English being impressionistic is precisely how I came to fall in love with English. It is a wonderfully flexible language that allows one to layer on intent, irony, contradictions, and subterfuge as one's wit and humor allows... This is truly a wonderful post that rang quite true and I thank you for it.
