Not enough words to go round

Vocabulary, is what we need my friend
Vocabulary, is what we need
Vocabulary, is what we need, my friend
but there are not enough words to go round ...

The other day - for a reason that now escapes me, but definitely made sense at the time - I had to explain to my daughter of five what homonyms are. I find it very useful, explaining things to children, because you have to reduce things to their essence without oversimplifying. In the case of homonyms, my explanation basically came down to the observation that we do not have enough words to describe everything, so we often use the same word to mean very different things. The examples I gave to her included the Dutch word "zei" ("said"), which is pronounced exactly the same way as the pronoun "zij" (which means "she" or "her"). Luckily, she didn't ask why adults are so stupid as not to have language where each word means only one thing, and there is a word for each thing, because that would have been impossible to explain.

Take for example two very important words: "rule" and "law". Both can be used to mean "something that naturally happens more or less the same way repeatedly", such as in "laws of nature", or - more often in the context of human society - a behavior we would like to either impose or penalize, such as in "rules of conduct". How is it that we cannot invent some words without this built-in ambiguity? Or the word right, for example, which can mean quite a few different, including "correct" (as in "I am right") and "something you can lay a claim to" ("I have the right to remain silent"). And the list goes on and on. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the 5000 most common words in the English language probably have an average of 2-3 meanings each, or more. The average is presumably a lot lower for specialist jargon, but even there, you will find this problem: the word "pitch", for example, has three different meanings in aviation alone.

So how do go about carving a masterpiece of meaning, if words are such blunt tools? The answer, of course, is by creating context, or combining words with other words. This does not completely eradicate the possibility of error, but it does reduce it significantly. In the case of the example I gave to my daughter, for example, I had to admit the theoretical possibility that someone hearing "hij zei" ("he said") might actually understand "he zij" ("he she"), but in most cases, the second combination of words wouldn't mean anything, and listeners would reject it as a possibility without even really thinking about it.

To be continued ....

Devaluation blues

All around me I see signs of the second law of thermodynamics - the one that says that things have a tendency to lose steam, run down, decay - expressed in human society. The examples that spring immediately to mind are schooling, money, words, and food, each of which seem to be worth less with the passing of time. But in fact, each case is very different.

First of all, I think that schooling is on the whole and in the longer run probably not getting worse, as everybody loves to say ("in my time, ..."), but better. Yes, there will be temporary ups and downs (in the order of magnitude of years, decades, and even generations), but collectively we know more now than a hundred years ago, and much more than several thousands of years ago, and schooling has definitely played a part in this. (This is by the way not contrary to the second law of thermodynamics: it acknowledges the existence of local anomalies, all it is concerned with is the the entropy of the system as the whole).

As for money (and the price of houses), its value goes up and down too. Of course, it has gone down now for a very long time, but this, I think, is linked to the fact that our economy is almost completely built on the idea that you have to grow to survive, which in fact is not necessarily true. There is also such a thing as stasis, and it might be good if we were to embrace that idea.

I already mentioned the devaluation of words in a previous entry, although I was talking specifically of curse words. But the same happens to any emotionally charged word, such as those indicating race, ethnic origin, culture, sexual orientation, etc. In the west, we have been obsessed with this long before the term "political correctness" was coined, as is evidenced by the long succession of names for migrant workers in Dutch society over the past fifty or sixty years.

And then we have food (and other consumables), which is suffering from the entropy of over-processing. It is like "overproducing" a record: there comes a point when every attempt at improving something just makes it worse. And I think we reached that point with food quite a while back. Here is my personal things-I-love-to hate list: decaf coffee, low-tar low-nicotine cigarettes, beer without alcohol, cola without sugar, hamburgers without fat, mayonnaise without eggs. (I could go on, but I am beginning to lose my appetite).

Last but not least, life itself is becoming less sacred. The Catholic Church may not yet realize it, but we have come to the point where having humongous families is no longer an option, or at least, not for all of us (I recently read that having large families is becoming a status symbol among rich American suburbanites, but I imagine this is just another local anomaly, which will iron itself out in the end).

The power of words

In the beginning was the Word ... (John 1.1, King James Bible).

I have always been fascinated with that line. It shows just how important words are to us. Of course, the heavens and the earth were created first, but even in the very first lines of the Genesis, it seemed worth noting what God called things: first God made light, then he divided the light from the darkness (a bit categorical, black-and-white thinking if you ask me) and then - drum roll, abated breath - he called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And a bit later he takes the trouble to call the dry land "Earth", the gathering together of the water "seas", etc. etc.

A more scientific-minded person might phrase things differently, and might maintain that the word was the beginning of civilization. A recent study (the details of which, unfortunately, I have forgotten) reported a correlation between increasing size of our brain and the increasing use of language, and suggested that it might be a case of positive reinforcement (the use of language being both cause and result of the increased brain capacity).

This was a study over many eons. I have not yet heard of any such correlation within an individual human life-span, so I am going to assume that my bigger-than-average head is not related to my preoccupation with words. (My wife, BTW, is always very happy to point out to me that there is no one-on-one correlation between the size of the skull and the size of the brain, nor even between the size of the brain and intelligence, and I am afraid I am going to have to concede her that. But I digress. Back to the power of words).

When I was a child, we used to say "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me", as a sort of magic incantation against psychological pressure. It never helped me much, though: I have always been more worried about and hurt by words than by acts. Of course, maybe this is just me: maybe I am like the proverbial oversensitive princess who tosses and turns all night because of the pea under the many mattresses. But the mere fact that there is a saying indicates to me that I am not alone in this. Wars have probably been waged over a few words.

Of course, there is also the positive side, as I have mentioned in an earlier entry. Expressing thoughts in words can help clarify and even accept things. (A different, but related power is that of the blogger: say the wrong thing to a blogger, and he or she will hang you out to dry. They might not name names, but everyone will know. And saying the right thing to a blogger is not much better, because nine times out of ten they will pass it off as their own idea: I have caught myself doing this several times already. But I digress again). They may be very imperfect tools - communication problems all around, and it can take a long time to say even relatively simple things clearly - but they are definitely worth having all the same.

Final note: the power of words is not everlasting. The other day my daughter told me - using a phrasing that was more a request for confirmation than a statement of fact - that she had a five-year-old friend who claimed she was now old enough to use curse words. I confirmed that swear words should be used with care, not so much because they are "baaad" words (to quote George Carlin's "Seven words you cannot use on T.V.") but because a lot of people are hurt and/or insulted when you use them, and because they lose their power if you use them too much, in which case they won't be there when you need them.

Of course, the problem is compounded by the fact that only some people feel the effects of this devaluation (usually the ones who cause it in the first place), while others continue to be insulted and hurt every time they are used. This second group may in fact develop the emotional equivalent of an allergy for four-letter words, and become ever less tolerant of swear words.

More on this polarization mechanism later.