Words

Ever wonder about words? It happens a lot learning a foreign language that you have this wonderful idea, but no words with which to express it. So you look for some other way to say what you want to say. Instead of "High Icelandic is spoken in falsetto," you might say something like, "In Iceland, they speak strangely in the court." Both of those are true statements, and they both sort of mean the same thing. Often, you'll leave a conversation wondering if you really communicated anything at all.
It happens a lot that my Spanish or French isn't enough. And, learning these languages, I notice that it happens a lot in English. You never think twice about it. Somebody doesn't understand what you say, so you try to say it in a different way. But have you ever left a conversation feeling as though you never really said what you meant, so what could the other person possibly be thinking about what you said? Almost as if you'd been speaking Spanish to a Portuguese speaker, only not so extreme?
Words are simply a medium of communication, much like music or art or holding hands or exchanging glances or sharing some sort of special hidden philotic link. It's common human nature to hold words as the ultimate in meaning, but this isn't true. How many times have you felt a feeling for which there was no expression, no single word that really sufficed?
The fact is, no word really suffices at all. Words are containers for ideas. Take a simple concept, like apple. Everybody agrees that an apple is an apple. Or do we? I think of a Red Delicious. Do you think of a Granny Smith? If you say pomme in French, are you talking about a potato, or an apple? If a concept as simple as a noun can be confusing and ambiguous, what about an emotion, like love? What about an adjective, like great? The fact is, no two people have exactly the same idea about what any word means, but we conduct our daily lives on the assumption that we all do.
Often times in the later stages of a budding relationship, I'll find myself arguing semantics over issues. I'll end up not actually arguing an issue, as in whether I did indeed leave the toilet seat down or forgot Valentine's Day. No, I'll be arguing what I mean when I say neglect, or something to that effect. Because at some point in a communicative relationship, you've got all of the easy problems solved, and you need a little more subtlety in your communications to simply understand the nature of the problem you're discussing, let alone the solution. Complicated problems require specific, focused solutions, and at a certain point single words or unambiguous phrases simply don't suffice to create understanding.
Talking to people is like an asymptotic curve in mathematics. You say something, and once it comes out of your mouth it's What You Think. From that point forward, each time you say it, you try out different word combinations and it becomes more and more What You Think, and less and less ambiguous for you. Eventually, you find the shortest combination of words to communicate what you feel is the essence of what you think. Approaching that asymptotic curve, as it were. Cutting the corners off of a square eventually makes a circle, if you do it enough. Thinking in this way is second nature when you're speaking a second language, but it's important to keep it in mind when you're speaking your first language, too.
-Donald