Isn’t it obnoxious how much of the world doesn’t speak English?
I went to Morocco one time and I stayed at a hotel where the concierge spoke Berber, Arabic, and French but not English. And I communicated with him through a fellow traveler from Germany who spoke German, French and English. Wouldn’t things be simpler if everyone just spoke the same language?
Except for the fact that I’ve also been to Ireland, where they speak English. And I still couldn’t understand anyone.
And I’ve been to Virginia, the same country where I grew up, where they speak English, American English, my English. And there were people I couldn’t understand.
It’s so easy to think of language as, like, thoughts and ideas. But words are only thoughts and ideas in the same way that a child’s drawing of a sunset is a sunset or a stick figure is a person. They’re representations, human made representations, therefore unavoidably imperfect.
Thoughts going on inside our heads are like those old lava lamps. They’re wishy-washy amorphous blobs, always rubbing up against each other, leaving residue, or completely fusing with one another and splitting back off into something different.
Like uneducated Southerners in the U.S. If you ask the average American to do an impression of an uneducated person, they naturally start doing a Southern accent. Why? The South has the same percentage of smart to dumb people as the North. But because at some point the blob of the thought “uneducated” and the blob of the thought “Southerner” were pushed into each other, some residue was left behind behind and, to this day, each of those words remind some people of the other.
And that’s treating ideas like they’re separate things.
There’s only one you, and you only have one brain, so all of the thoughts going on in your head make up that single entity: your brain. But imagining thoughts and ideas as separate or as singular is inaccurate. Reality is more complicated than that. There really is no way to put words to reality.
But we do our best, we take this thing, or these things, our thoughts and ideas, and we slice them up and assign words to them. But our thoughts and ideas are like our own private cakes. And we all grow up learning how to slice it up the way society thinks we should, but it’s ultimately up to each of us to slice up our own cakes. And even if you took two identical cakes and had two separate people slice them as identically as possible, the chance they would actually be sliced identically is basically zero. And no two people have identical cakes anyway.
Take “dog” for example. “Dog” just means “dog”. But when I say “dog”, some people picture a Chihuahua. And some people picture a Rottweiler. Some people think about loud barks and gnashing teeth. Others think about a fuzz bucket curled up by your feet. But it’s just one word. Dog. And when I use it, I mean what I mean, not what you think. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I use it to mean what I mean, you think what you think regardless of what I mean. Know what I mean?
And that’s just the word “dog”. You want to try and have a deep, intellectual conversation about politics? Good luck! Ever hear the word “conservative” before? If you ask any two people on the planet what “conservative” means, it will be amazing if the two definitions are as similar as a Chihuahua is to a Rottweiler.
But we use the word “conservative” because sometimes, we need to talk about things that we can’t point to and we can’t draw a picture of. And even if we’re just communicating at 30% efficiency, it’s worth doing. Because almost none of the most worthwhile things in the world can be done without sharing our thoughts with one another.
These are the things I think about sometimes. And the moral of the story is: communication is hard. And when miscommunication happens, it’s not because everyone else is stupid. It’s just a complicated, imperfect system that takes a bit of extra work sometimes. And it’s worth the extra work. People are worth the extra work. Usually.
