Language is... wrong?

 



What even is language? There are so many different forms all over the world. Each has developed uniquely over time. Even the same language is spoken differently in various regions. And with all this, language is supposed to be how we communicate. Couple distinct thoughts with dialect that is not universally understood in the same manner, and our entire method of communicating is absolute chaos. Yet… it doesn’t seem like such.

The literary critic who identifies as a deconstructionist will ignore any intentions by the author and purely analyze whatever is on the page. But what if we applied this to the whole world? If we ignored all the taught connotations and inferences based on context and instead just applied definitions as they are to words – with many words having multiple definitions – language, as we know it, just falls apart. Just look at “… Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears to see an example of this (no, I don’t actually listen to her; I just saw a really bad singing audition for this song and wanted to know what it was supposed to sound like, and I found an interesting fact in the YouTube comments). Most people think that “hit me” signifies some abusive relationship. However, the songwriters were foreign and heard ‘hit me up’ meant ‘call me,’ so they used “hit me” in the song to signify calling: not an abusive relationship.

This is probably a lot more common in classes where you have to analyze texts. As Mark Twain famously said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Now, I’m not questioning him, but technically he is only right if your entire audience is just a clone of you. Everyone perceives words and syntax differently. That’s why we can have discussions on analysis. However, what might be the perfect word to you, may just be confusing to the next person. Think about Shakespeare. I can’t even begin to describe the headaches I got trying to read his plays – which I’m sure he worded precisely as to convey the message – without a modern English translator.

All right, I’ve described the problem I see with language, but what does this have to do with ordinary life or all the other languages around the word as I mentioned at the beginning? The first time I went to Starbucks, I order some drink in the grande size. Why grande? Because I wanted the largest size, and I didn’t actually look at their sizing chart. I just knew the names of the four sizes without actually knowing how much they held. Grande sounded bigger than large, and venti meant absolutely nothing to me, so I thought grande was the biggest. Apparently, venti is the biggest. Grande and venti aren’t English words, but my issue here isn’t with them being Spanish, rather, they serve as a trivial example of what happens when languages, which have developed very differently, begin to mix. Just like a deconstructionist, I saw four words (the four sizes) and analyzed them without involving context. Granted, it’s not a perfect example, but it shows how we can all interpret languages differently when we do not all have the same thought process – which we don’t.

So, what do we do now? I don’t really know; it’s just a topic with an open-ended question that I thought would be interesting to talk about.

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