"A picture is worth 1,000 words"
"Silence speaks louder than words"
Language is so inadequate to describe life, to describe thought. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time in my thesaurus recently. But really, how do you communicate something that doesn't have a word to describe it? Even if you were to make up your own word for it, you must describe it with other words if anyone else is to understand it. You could choose to attempt communication by approximating words and describing it through things that it is (but isn't) like. You could say all of the things that it isn't, but that would take years. Or you could decide not to try explaining it at all. That way there could be no misunderstandings as to what your thoughts and experiences really are. So, I guess the real question here is would it be better that way? Is it better to understand someone else's thoughts incorrectly, or incompletely, or to not know them at all?
1 comment:
The philosophy of language is fascinating. At the base of everything, how does language even work? If I say something, how do I know you understand what I mean? You could explain what you think I mean, but that would require me to understand you correctly. And so on and so forth. It's the same problem as never being sure that what when you say "red," you mean the same thing that I do, because the object I see that looks a certain way (which I call red) could look completely different to you, and we'd have no where in the muddled middle to express the difference, since we each take the other to mean.....
Oh, never mind.
I want to hug you.
Because there are no good words for that.
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