A Critique of Language

Words are so limited. Each noun, adjective, or verb is a label for one or a handful of points in the three-dimensional space of reality. Each one comes with a connotation that is customized based on where you are and what you've experienced; but each remains relatively similar within each language and dialect.

Describing a horse and a cow is relatively easy--less so with an imaginary half-cow, half-horse creature. Every single person that reads this will come up with an entirely different image.

Thus, the adjective: a word that makes another word more specific. A 35% horse, 65% cow creature? A swift, sleek, ruddy, unbridled, defensive horse-cow? The picture is both more and less clear: because every word is a point, a zone, a region of vocabulary space. And just like number lines and cartesian grids, if it were possible to define every single point, then non-real numbers wouldn't exist. Yet, if it isn't possible to define everything completely, then the definition system is limited.

And these limits matter because reality doesn't fit neatly into the little defining points. Two people may commit murder, and one will be horrific and the other justified. We categorize and shuffle further, but are any second-degree murders really the same?

Can every thought be put into words? By translating the inner workings of our minds into language, they become communicable to others; and more understandable to ourselves. We understand labels, because they are concrete, definite. But it is that very trait that makes them unrealistic--because life is abstract and doesn't fit neatly into a box.

Our very thoughts are often inexpressible; they just are. They surround us, environmentalize us, are us. Putting them into words takes away the wonder and awe; it is only a mere representation that exists in language, an estimation of what was reality--for once the decimal places are rounded off, they are lost forever.

Such it is with all the arts. Literature attempts to express the greatest truths of reality in the leaves of a book; and we find them there, but do we really experience them? Music also tries to speak those same truths, but that language, too, is limited; for who can say what note lies a few cents sharper than a C? Or what brilliant chords and harmonies are possible in the region between G and G-sharp? Artists try to capture moments on canvas; and they do so, brilliantly. But what is a moment in the realm of eternity? Can a moment express an experience? Movies try to duplicate reality on the silver screen, overwhelming our minds by speaking to our ears and eyes at once; but even if scents could emanate from the pictures, they would still fall short of that great standard of our experiences.

Such it is with experience: so long studied, so often duplicated and substituted; so little understood. How much we owe language, for allowing the progress, understanding, and wisdom that exists today; and how much language limits us from truly expressing the infinite!


"No bird has ever uttered note
That was not in some first bird's throat."
(Thomas Bailey Aldrich)