Our world of words
Though each of us begins life as aware and sensory beings, language is not something we are born with. While most contemporary linguists believe that humans are born with a “hard-wired” grammatical architecture, words themselves are particular to each specific culture or family in which the newborn is raised. Regional dialects? Fuggedaboutit!
By the time we are six-months old, words establish meaning. While verbal communication skills are not well developed, feelings and memories have been connected to repeated verbalizations, facial expressions and the tone of voice of parents or siblings. At one-year old, most babies are already using some words with precision.
Language is an abstraction of direct sensory experience (seeing, hearing, feeling, etc.), and eventually forms the basis of personal memory and thought. In time, we are immersed in an ocean of linguistic waves that form a fluid psychological symbolic map of our world. Through communication with words, we establish shared conventional associations and convey ideas to others. Thus a greater level of cooperation is possible than through gesture, guttural sounds, chirps or whistles alone, and highly complex abstract word-based thinking has provided the gateway to dramatically transform reality. Technology, mathematics, physics, and all elaborations of the spoken and written word are the fruits of verbal articulation.
The words we use today are not entirely the same as those English words used even 100 years ago. As cultures shift and change, language evolves and must continuously adapt in order to continue to convey changed meaning and fresh experience. Elizabethan English would be difficult for many of today’s English speaking Americans to understand easily, and our American English would be nearly indecipherable to an Elizabethan – think “Google it!” Nonetheless, the very ease with which we use words often obscures the rich and deep underlying root meaning they contain.
Why are some words deemed obscene and objectionable and why do other words stimulate curiosity? Is grammar necessary, are the rules of grammar fixed, and if so, why? Who fixed them and who made them the boss?
Let’s examine the word “language” itself. Not surprisingly it is derived from the Latin “lingua” meaning “tongue.” It is through our tongue that we first experience the world, and with our tongue that we learn to form words that allow us to convey the various flavors of existence. As babies, we literally “taste” the world, subjecting virtually everything to an oral evaluation. This oral fixation extends naturally to the mouth and lips, among the most sensitive and sensuous of body parts. Anthropologists propose that human society first organized around food and mealtimes, and today, cookbooks are among the most reliable best-sellers. Eating has become our national pastime – garlic fries, anyone?
All words emerge from the mouth, and mouth metaphors are plentiful. When a boy I was told to, “keep a civil tongue in your mouth, young man.” If I spoke harshly, I was advised to “bite your tongue!” More than once, my “dirty” mouth was washed out with soap. We “lick” our enemies and “savor” victory, “chew” on problems that are too much to “swallow,” and when we “taste” defeat, it “sucks!”
We use language to construct our world – recasting of experience in symbolic form – and like the babies we all once were, our linguistic oral fixation continues.
Reprinted from www.theiscollection.com
