2009年12月9日水曜日
The frustrations of trying to communicate
I think human language is really inadequate in terms of vocabulary. There are some things we encounter every single day that we don’t have words for, just because they are slightly abstract in nature. For example, most days a thought I don’t really like will keep popping into my head, and I have to make an effort to clear it away. We have words like ‘idea’, ‘belief’ and ‘delusion’, but no one word specifically for this kind of ‘head garbage’, for negative concepts, thoughts or any type of cognitive phenomenon or qualia that left unresolved causes some kind of distress or dissonance. One word for that would be really useful. Or a word for a person that we don’t like but have to tolerate due to circumstances. A single word for that would be good. We have ‘friend’, ‘enemy’, ‘lover’, ‘acquaintance’ and so forth, so why not a word that means someone who is an unfortunate necessity? Also, we have the word ‘aspect’, as in an ‘aspect’ of an object, practice or situation, but no word for an aspect of something that causes misapprehension or confusion. A single word for that would be really helpful for expressing our thoughts. These descriptions may seem strange, but if these words already existed we would take them for granted. I think that if English, and other languages, were a little more finely discriminating in relation to more abstract notions, we would be able to communicate more efficiency, maybe even more joyfully. I’m sick of having to use whole sentences to communicate some kind of idea I know exists because I can feel it in my mind, just because there isn’t a single word for it, even though it’s something I encounter frequently in my everyday experience.
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