Semantics (how good is English?)

There comes a point with any tool where it becomes only as limited as the user. There are several different options to improve your situation, and I'll suggest a few.

1. Gain more tools.
   
2. Gain new techniques to use with the same tools.
   or, what I find works best-
   
3. Develop multiple personalities with contradictory world views, emotions, and goals so you will understand how other people misinterpret what you are trying to communicate.

Oooh, that is an easy one, Chip! You could have asked the meaning of life if you wanted to get into slightly muddier philosophic waters.

I'll skip over the philosophy as there are shelves of books devoted to the questions you pose and skip straight to pragmatics. One of the advangtages that English has is that it is such a hodge-podge to begin with that forming new ways of expressing new concepts is almost a natural feature. We'll borrow foreign terms when needed (e.g. schadenfreude), we'll happily verb nouns and noun verbs, we generate acronyms IMHO at the drop of a hat. There is also tons of redundancy in English which can actually be measured by compressability which is usually around 10:1 (this is for written text, phonemic compression is certainly different but I don't know whether more or less so); the redundancy helps in the reconstruction of speech noisy or lossy channels. I'm not claiming that English is any sort of pinnacle of expressivity, but it does have good extensibility.

It was once asserted (cf. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) that language strongly determined that which could be conceptualized, but later work (e.g. Kay & Kempton) which pretty conclusively demonstrated that at best, language may guide thought and categorization but does not strongly determine it.

English is indeed a "sloppy, ambiguous, imprecise mess" but there have been numerous attempts to rectify that all of which were unmitigated failures. It may be important to note that "logic" as we know it is a pretty recent parlor trick and that human experience and cognition often are outside the boundaries of what one can do in a more stringent mode of expression. If you ever doubt that it is possible to have thoughts that defy expression in language, I can refer you to a bar in Amsterdam where you could quickly have that notion obviated.

If I had to guess, I think the problem that is underlying the quandry you pose in your original post is not a deficiency of language, but rather one of increasing polarization (dogmatization?) of thought and televistic fondness for "thought bites"; that is, if it cannot be expressed in a sentence or two, you may well lose your audience, much as I have likely done a couple of paragraphs ago.

I find this talk of the relative complexity etc of different languages quite interesting. Perhaps because I know nothing about it. The only thing I remember is a professional linguist friend I once had, who told me that all languages actually have the same complexity, but distributed differently about their persons, so to speak. He said it was inevitable because it was a reflection of a part of the physical brain.

Didn't seem terribly convincing to me. I imagined a dumb culture. I suppose he would say that the equalising was across the whole spectrum of symbolic communication, including gesture etc etc.

He dedicated his life to creating a written language for one unwritten language after another, then translating the Christian bible into each, and then of course, they put in the teachers/missionaries. He was on his fourth when I met him. All African tribal languages I think.

I didn't approve, not that it mattered

You most certainly did not. I at least was with you right to the end. Compressibility is interesting. I'll look around for a comparative table. This language thing could interest lots me in another place and time. Great stuff for postgraduate research.

Self portrait?

So it would be safe to say your anti-semantic?

:::duck::::

haha Kendra *rimshot* No, I just wish everyone had the same decoder ring.

d-r-i-n-k o-v-a-l-t-i-n-e ??!!

Great post, Malachi. Thanks for the info. I'll have to look up some summaries of those studies. I find the topic really fascinating.

We should all be using telepathy! I blame the Bush administration for not pushing this in our schools!

Read to the end, as well. Well worth the time, Mal.

I would offer the work of Kenneth Burke as a compliment to what you have asserted here. Specifically, Burke addresses your notion,"I think the problem that is underlying the quandry you pose in your original post is not a deficiency of language, but rather one of increasing polarization (dogmatization?)," with a definition of 'man' as "the symbol using, making, and mis-using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, and rotten with perfection."

Your notions and those of Burke diverge when he posits a means through which language both selects and reflects reality--language is ideology which informs language. He called these the "terministic screens."


http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/454/roadmap.html

Gorgeous. Is the guy a frustrated poet ? Or is it a reference I don't recognise ?

Nope. Just your average literary critic/linguist/rhetorician/philosopher. Very, very rarely are they able to tap the poetic. Burke is one of those.

How do you know what is poetry and what isn't? Aside from the beret.

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't --- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less."

"The question is", said Alice, "whether you CAN make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master --- that's all."

She practices an answer:

1. Years and years of expensive and, largely, unproductive schooling? [Naw, too elitist]

2. I know it when I see it? [Nope, that describes pornography]

3. It is in the eye of the behol. . . [stop that poo-poo right there before someone puts an eye out]

4. It is what occurs in a privileged space? [promising--very vague but smacks of Philosophy 401]

5. Berets are cool. Add a cigarette and a stand-up bass--you are golden!! [I am going with this one, Chance.]

How many people have seen a haiku but not realized its significance? (Usually being told a definition of "what a haiku is" beforehand)

try reading up on General Semantics, it is a methadology to help reduce the confusion that language serves up. http://www.general-semantics.org/

It can get pretty in-depth as GS leads to improvements in all areas of communication including music and non-verbal communication. But the basic 'rules' can really be helpfull.

The starting point for GS is the fact that we have a brain that does NOT see the world as it truely is, but interprets it. Each brain is different so each 'thing' 'looks' different to each brain. For example our colour-blind friends do not interpret colours the way non-cb people do.

In my opinion, the major problem with language (and the heated debates on these boards for example) is that without clarification people interpret others words in ways we cannot regulate.

"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing." - Anais Nin

GS will help you, with simple tools like saying 'in my opinion' instead of just saying your opinion and having someone think you are trying to spout facts. We do that all the time, we think we are right based on our interpretation, our abstraction from reality of what the real facts are. We can give examples of why we think our interpretation of the truth is correct. For example, one of our fellow SLers and forum participant, a litterate person based on what I read, wrote "Religion seeks to ask the right questions", an example of what those questions might be would have clarified their point.

On a personal level, in my opinion, GS will help you communicate with yourself in a less confusing way too, and if you want to extrapolate like A.E. Van Vogt did in the first Hugo award for best sci-fi book after WWII, (The World of Null-A is the title) you can become a superman haha!! obviously that statement is not clarified enough so I will do so.
A.E. Van Vogt, the French sci-fi writer (in case there is another A.E. Van Vogt who is a plumber on your block etc) was a student of GS obviously, as he quoted many of the GS writtings in his books on Null-A and he extrapolated that the human brain could be trained to acheive great feats such as the oft-told stories of superhuman strength exhibited by people in a deep emotional state, such as a mother being able to lift a car off her child (perhaps such storys are urban legends but I believe you have seen instances, perhaps on a smaller scale, of what I mean, a common one is how to combat stage-fright, many people in the acting/public speaking biz allow themselves to panic for a second, get the addrenaline rush and then calm down).

We are "stronger" when we have addrenaline in our system, I believe that is a scientific theory accepted as fact these days, and wouldn't it be nice to have a surge of endorphins, at will, when you are feeling depressed... Essentially the GS trained human colonists of Venus in the Null-A books (there's a sequal) thwart an invasion by a 'superior' alien force, without any organisation or orders, each person saw the situation and did what was necessary based on what was available to them. A perfect state of anarchy as they had no government or laws except a general concensus on what was appropriate for their culture.

I once saw Timothy Leary speak at my college and he, for all the "strangeness" he was "famous" for, was the most understandable speaker I ever heard. I contrast that with the republicans I see and hear in the news and realise that they, based on what I have heard and read for the past couple of decades really think that their opinions are facts and will go to extreme lengths to see that what they interpret as a fact is the way things should be. The most infamous example is radio-guy Rush Limbaugh, even taking the outright lies out of the mix, he speaks his opinions as if they were facts and, in my opinion, many weak minded people just believe it without questioning him.

ok, I will end now! *hugs*

Chip, I think you're an awesome, very smart guy, and I hope I wasn't coming off as argumentative in our *theism discussion. I think that it's a problem common to all language - Person A encodes a message in the language and lexicon they know - every experience in our life and every different definition and use of each word we know builds up in our head. Different cultural backgrounds, different paths we've walked in our lives, ect, ect... I think this increases when dealing with abstract concepts like, "love", "freedom", "poverty" - I'm sure that people in different countries and different states have an almost entirely different definition of what "poverty" means - For me missing a paycheck and not being able to pay the electric bill is damn near close - I'm sure there are people in the world who would be disgusted by this attitude, I'm sure there are still a handful of languages out there that don't even have the word "electricity" in them. By the time Person B gets the message and runs it through their decoder ring, who knows how much of it will "click" with them and how much they will even graze against Person A's intended meaning - to me it's amazing how much we are actually able to communicate and get across.

Heck, I still haven't found a good explaination of the Spanish phrase, "Que Pasa?" - In highschool I ran across it and the word "que" translates to "what" and the word "pasa" translates to "raisin", yet "que pasa" means "What's up"... Or if you've ever heard Gallagher's skit about how we park in a driveway and drive in a parkway, and so on... I'm certainly no linguist, only know a little Spanish these days and English, but language is frusteratingly quirky. Speaking of which, Jillian, what's an "Aspies"?

Thanks Logan I'm not annoyed at anyone, really. That topic gets me a little riled because I'm passionate about it and it can be frustrating to have your decoder ring tuned to a different frequency than everyone else. I rarely get angry at people for the ideas they hold. I get angry at the ideas for holding the people. If that makes any sense at all.

Interesting points about subjectivity. So much of what we need language to convey is subjective to begin with, it's only natural that the words we use will also be subjective, and depend largely on context. I'm very interested in gaining understanding of how cultural memes propogate through language beyond the intent of the speaker, by virtue of the associations that get attached to words through time. How much does it cause the listener to hear in the speakers message that wasn't intended to be there?

The atheism definition is just one example. People tend to only hear the cultural meme and discard all the other meanings the word actually carries. Some atheist group in California has started calling themsleves "brights" instead of atheists trying to escape from the stigma. It's annoying enough when people are forced to change words through involuntary change, but I truly want to smack people who do it on purpose. It makes me wonder how much of the change in the language is caused by necessity and new concepts, and how much of the change is driven by politics, spin, religion, and fashion... and when words become distorted by those things, how much does their use help spread those things beyond the intent of the speaker?

Personal observation from dealing with friends and family: People lie.
I'm not talking about the big lies - I'm talking about the small subtle shifts, meant to go unnoticed, while arguing or debating especially, to save face.

Sister: Don't stare through the microwave oven door like that!!!
Me: But I wanna see when the cheese is ready.
Sister: You'll get cancer and radiation poisoning!
Me: No I won't.
Sister: Yes you will.
Me: No I won't - there's no radiation!
Sister: There's microwaves!
Me: That's not radiation - well Ok, yes it is, but not the "uranium-glow-green-in-the-dark-kind". Microwave radiation can heat me - hell it can cook me - but it won't cause mutations in my cells that lead to cancer.
Sister: Well I didn't mean *that* type of radiation. *I* didn't say anyhting about uranium. I meant microwave radiation.
Me: But you said radiation poisoning!
Sister: So? Cooking you with radiation is gonna "poison" you pretty f***ed isn't it.
Me: That's not what "radiation poisoning" means!!!
Sister: THATS HOW I MEANT IT!!!!
Me: BULLSHIT! YOU SAID IT WOULD CAUSE CANCER!!
Sister: NO I DIDN"T
Me: YES YOU DID - YOU SAID I"D GET CANCER FROM RADIATION POISONING!!!!
Sister: NO I DIDN"T!!!!
Me: YES YOU DID!!!

<<pauses to catch breath>>
So, ok, English itself is very fluid and dynamic - but isn't the problem in our ducking and diving - covertly pretending that's now what we meant when we said it - blaming the other's understanding of a word (just because the dictionary had YOUR definition doesn't mean I can't use MINE!! You should know what I mean anyway) - and the fact that both of us are professing expertise in a field we heard about on a 5 minute TV segment - using terms that DO have well-defined meanings, which unfortuanately we are both ignorant of, just so the I can be right and you can be wrong and I can win.

And then we blame the poor, defenseless language

Or is it just me

Chip,

To expand a little on what some other posters have already said, I believe that what you regard as the weakness of the spoken language can, in fact, be seen as its strength. The actual definition of words is only a part of their meaning. Each word picks up associations, either personal ones or cultural ones, and it is the play of associations that can often provide the true meaning of what is said.

The language is allusive, and those who perceive it literally will lose a lot of its meaning.

This can be seen most clearly in the highest levels of the spoken language. Take a phrase from Shakespeare:-

Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.

If you try to explain that in literal terms you will not get a result that makes much sense. But if you take the 'meaning' - the words plus their associations (how much meaning the word 'syllable' gains!) - you will see what is meant. And because it's Shakespeare, you will get to the meaning before you have even processed the words.

So while language sometimes falls down when it comes to precision, it is a wonderful medium for the expression of elliptical, allusive thought, and a single sentence can have a multitude of simultaneous meanings attached to it.

Having said all that, I have been at times frustrated with the cultural differences which sometimes mean Americans and Englishmen talk to each other while totally missing what the other is trying to say. And I also hate the sloppy changes of meaning that have been mentioned.

That might just be because I'm a pedantic old sod, but when someone uses 'discrete' instead of 'discreet' or 'crescendo instead of 'climax' I am conscious that their sloppiness, if it becomes current, will reduce the distinction that the words currently have, and will thereby reduce the language.

I (at least thing and hope and assume, eheh) that makes perfect sense to me. It's a topic most of us are passionate about. Forums + Religion &/or Politics = Trouble, 9 times outta 10.



Funny thing, I just got a work memo that had "resent project specifications" in it - I read it a couple times thinking, "Who has resentment towards the project specifications and why?" until I realised that they meant "re-sent" or "Sent again"



I was thinking last night, and I remember when I was about 13 I heard the term "agnostic" on an episode of "Northern Exposure", when a character basically stated that the existance of a higher power cannot be proven, not can it be disproven. That was my "first impression" of the term, it clicked and made sense to me. For a while I considered myself eclectic, meaning that I took things that made sense from different religions and integrated them into my own belief system. But, I got tired of explaining that to people and went back to the term "agnostic" because I got less of a "what's that?" reply. Until yesterday I had never even thought of it as a way of saying, "I don't want to commit to either side of the argument", I thought of it as meaning, "I don't think God can be proven, or disproven."

((tomorrow tomorrow theres always tomorrow allowing us to procrastinate untill the last syllable is spoken and time is no more, how sad that makes me feel, how desirous it makes me to live life now))

((Did I do that????))

((P.S. I like climax instead of cresendo! (giggles) ))

My theory of where new English words come from:

Border crossings: New words in English come from the places that often isolated marginalized groups and the "larger English-speaking society" meet.

Examples:
Prison (newbie, shiv, bitch, screw)
Geographical/National/Linguistic borders (Spanglish--portmanteau words that have shifted meaning/usage)
Marginalized groups within a homogenous society (examples would be the words "bling-bling," "pimp," and "ho" which were co-opted from the language of Hip-Hop)
Marginalized groups "reowning" pejoratives (The Cajun reowning of "coonass" from the French "Conasse" or "dirty whore" or "idiot." It sounds as if the "brights" are attempting to escape the stigma of "atheist" in a society that is placing ever-increasing value on the Judeo-Christian tradition)
Technologically adept communities within larger society (my father, just last week, asked me what a "blog" was)
Drug users

Because new usages for English words come from places of marginalization, these words are already imbued with deeper ideological significance. The notion that atheists in California would rename themselves "brights" belies a cultural pressure to which they are sensitive--they are being marginalized.

By necessity, these groups develop a language that allows them to communicate with other members of the community while keeping that communication "in-group." More often than not, these words are merely picked up by "fashion, politics, spin" long after they have lost immediacy for the groups using them.

I had one of those exact same moments. I looked at it, wondered why they did not like the specs and then did the big DOH! and smacked my forehead. LOL




I loved the character Marilyn Whirlwind in that show, by the way. I could so relate to her because I was a lot like her when I was younger. Probably sometimes, I still am.

Anyhow - I do the same thing. I used to call myself a "Cafeteria Catholic", in other words taking bits & pieces that I felt were good or useful from what I was taught as a child. Also taking bits and pieces from the spiritual part of the Native American side of my heritage that I was taught that I felt were useful in life.

Being raised a Catholic/Native American but not really believing in God or Spirits in that sense anymore, I'm more an agnostic. Can't prove it exists, can't prove that it dosen't.

People can do bad things in the name of science (frontal lobotomy) just as they do bad things in the name of religion (crusades). The older I get, the more I think that some people just look for an excuse to do bad things. It's the sad state of human affairs and I think it is the perpetual state of humans who don't do these things to always wonder what motivates those that do.

I was really struck by Chip's point about people being owned by an idea as opposed to themselves owning an idea. I wonder at times, if this is not one of the differences?

Interesting thread.

Very interesting points, Euterpe. The margins of society do seem to be a breeding ground for new words and new meanings for old words. What first set me off on the whole atheist vs agnostic issue a few years ago was the realization that the position most agnostics hold is exactly the same as that of most atheists, and that's not a new thing. The definition most non-atheists hold for atheism isn't accurate. It has become a misrepresentation of most of the people it is meant to describe, hence the reason so many people who in fact would be considered atheists by it's more basic definition do not use the word, or don't even know it applies to them... and the saddest part of all, have no idea that most of the people who do use the word have exactly the same beliefs they do.

I truly believe that state of affairs is a direct result of the word atheist becoming tainted by negative stereotypes. It has led to a situation where you have a very large group of people who are all basically the same, where a large percentage of them say "Oh no, I'm not one of those people," when in fact they are speaking about people who are exactly the same as they are, and unwittingly aid the spread of the mischaracterization. To me this seems a perfect example of how words become politicized, twisted, and fail us... and become carriers of cultural memes that don't aid communication but in fact hinder it.

Of course I could be wrong about all of it

Once again, no need to rehash any of that. People can call themselves whatever they like. It's the process by which that happens that fascinates me, and makes me wonder how many similar instances there are in our language.