Etymosophy (2)

on words as tools, and wordsmiths that are fools

Imagine you see a man using a spoon to cut through a piece of meat. After a chuckle or two, you would feel sorry for the guy, and your instinct would be to tell him that he is using the utensil incorrectly, to teach him what the purpose of the spoon is, and to give him a knife, if what he desires is to cut. This would be a natural and even salvific instinct, which is why you would be surprised, confused, even horrified, when someone else watching the scene intervenes to tell you, Leave him be, he’s learned to use it like this, everybody uses it like this, in fact, because he is using the spoon as a knife, it actually is a knife, don’t you know cutlery evolves.

This is how people react when I talk about words and their misuse. The analogy is used to highlight how absurd this attitude is if applied to anything else. No one would call the misuse of a spoon the evolution of cutlery, but rather its degeneration. Yet with language, our primary tool for making sense of everything, which is just as nourishing for our minds as eating is for our bodies, this logical attitude is completely reversed, and in fact, from the reactions I generally receive, considered perverse. The situation is even worse, however, and the analogy does not go far enough. First, it would have to be a spoon that is only handle and no bowl, which is how far the degeneration of language has gotten through common use, and even sometimes purposeful corruption, since a people who cannot use words correctly cannot think correctly, and if we can’t think correctly we are very easy indeed to control. To make the analogy more accurate we would have to speak about tools for farming too, and how impossible it is to till the earth of meaning, because it’s not just about direct nourishing, specific words, but rather the whole structure of understanding that language is meant to serve and which is its use.

If you dare point out that words come from somewhere, that they have original meanings and thus purposes, and that evolution cannot be just any kind of change but a change in a certain direction, an expansion of the original meaning, not its reversal or complete abandonment, you are considered insane, or deluded, or perhaps that this particular crusade is of no use, it’s a lost battle, let us go on using these words as we receive them, let us continue cutting our steaks with bowless spoons, after all, none of this is set in stone, they are only tools. I have actually had people say this to me, and my instinct is to tell them to wipe their asses with poison ivy or perhaps sanding paper, after all, a leaf is just as good as any other.

Even the best analogies can only go so far, of course, and there are aspects not captured with this one. A reasonable objection would be that if we start going through the list of linguistic corruptions and correcting them all, even if we limit ourselves only to proper usage and not form, since that is a whole other problem, we will end up speaking in a way that no one else understands. This may be a fair objection in some ways, except it’s also completely beside the point, because when we point out a certain corruption and highlight the original meaning, we are not remaking everything, we are simply trying to nudge language use in certain directions, away from the precipice of meaninglessness. And this is particularly hilarious, or depressing, depending on the days, because these exchanges and admonitions always come from people who are wordsmiths, by which I mean, they do not use language only to communicate about daily practical affairs, they write about things and ideas, and thus should at least in theory be concerned about preciseness, not just intelligibility. Apparently this is not the case. But furthermore, it is obvious to me that we should not forget every other linguistic consideration for the sake of intelligibility, first because by that logic, were we to be able to communicate in zeros and ones alone, we should do so, but of course these same people would not agree to that, at least I hope not. But more importantly because that is the direction in which language always goes, and why it keeps accumulating degenerations, and that ease always turns to disease later, and the more it happens, the harder it is to reverse.

Christians with this attitude, specifically, lead me to despair. Are they not supposed to be worshipers of the Word, through whom and by whom all was made? Then why do I always find in so many of them such a resistance to the idea of using language in a more accurate and precise way, not only about words in general, which would be bad enough, but about specific words related to the very religion. Traditionalists, specifically, are always so preoccupied about the correct chain of transmission and the degeneration and corruption of their ideas and practices, but then care nothing at all about this. Here, perhaps, the reason is that some corruptions are indeed very old, and some of them were even purposefully perpetrated to make certain incoherent ideas seem more palatable. Not that this is a sin exclusive to them. So called philosophers have been at it for a long time, their tactic is always the same, if it doesn’t make sense or fit reality in any way, they concoct a new word and call it the missing link, and not all of them were christians. But we won’t speak about that here. We can speak instead of a very simple one, misused basically by everyone, and which should be fairly uncontroversial in terms of corruption by the churches and the traditions: elite. This is an important word in the New Testament, although it appears in another form: elect. Elite used to mean the chosen of God, and by proper extension someone who excels in something Good. But now it is used almost exclusively to designate parasites and enemies of God, defiling a word that was deemed important enough to figure specifically in what some consider holy scriptures, inspired by the highest God himself. And what do you suppose happens when I point this out. It’s the evolution of language, stupid.

In fact, they will go further than this. They will say it doesn’t really matter. If you point out that all their talk about humility means nothing if they don’t even understand that the word comes from humus, that much if not most of what they are saying cannot be meaningfully related to this origin, they will not try to understand it, they will cling to whatever meanings the word acquired through the centuries, and refuse to distinguish what makes sense from what does not, and won’t even consider that this origin might be useful to distinguish true from false humility, and that connecting it with all the other related words, such as human, or humiliation, might prove to be enlightening for many other things and in many other areas of understanding. This is a much larger problem than one word or another, because words are all connected, and from one we make a thousand, and unless we consider that they are completely arbitrary, rather than have some necessity about them, some real essence, then one corruption always leads to many thousands, if we consider all the combinations, and as degeneration piles upon degeneration, exponentially. And much like trying to digest a whole steak, which we could not cut because we were using a spoon rather than a knife, reality becomes impossible to make sense of if we use the wrong words, because we know nothing of their origins, and their various connections, and their implications.

Some excuse themselves by saying it’s a question of intelligibility, that if they don’t use this or that word incorrectly, then nobody will know what they are saying. This is frankly false, for the reason already mentioned: words are always connected, they do not exist in vacuum. And while some use this precise excuse to counter the very idea of degeneration, it actually provides a reason to counter it. As an example, for years I have consciously avoided using the word ‘technology’, unless I mean the study of technique, which I rarely do. (I have noted elsewhere how the very misuse of this word to mean the application rather than the study of technique actually renders impossible, or at least very rare, the actual study of it). Instead I use machinery, for example. No one, so far, has been lost as to what I meant when I said whatever it was I was saying. And this is a category in which misuse and corruption are everywhere, which would make it even harder to understand, but it doesn’t, it is perfectly intelligible. In fact, if anything, this overuse of the suffix logy, among some others (and hellenic forms in general, where clear, anglo-saxon words would work just as well or better) is usually a sign of unintelligible, and often even meaningless, verbiage, and more generally an attempt by the writer to make whatever he is saying sound more important and profound than it is, if he is saying anything at all and not just throwing words together with no connection to anything that actually exists. But even bringing it back to more down to earth words and usages, it is a non issue. I find that when I use different, more accurate words to express the same meaning commonly expressed by other, misused words, people tend to understand it through context, which is the most normal thing in the world, since we are built for it, and language itself is built for it. Then maybe other people will see the why, and perhaps even adopt it, if they understand the specific benefit, which I always try to explain, although the overall benefits are so far reaching as to be almost endless, again because words are all connected and language is a whole. The problem is that rarely do I find anyone who admits any benefit whatsoever.

The real problem is thus the common attitude towards degeneration in language, more than the particular examples of degeneration themselves. In general people are not against learning, and appreciate it when their understanding is increased, and if they see something that isn’t working, or is being used incorrectly, they would gladly point it out to help whoever is using it wrongly. Again, if we think of the cutlery analogy, if someone showed the man using a spoon to cut a steak and a knife to eat soup the right way to use both, he would be grateful and then more nourished, and from then on not only use the utensils correctly but help and teach others to do the same, so everyone could be equally better nourished. But this is far from the case with language. I find there is a specific resistance to this very obvious reality. I don’t know why, since in almost every other sphere they are able to see it, and generally want to counter it. People will fight to keep the corrupt usages, even if they care about degeneration and corruption in every other sphere of human existence, which again, depending on the day, it’s either funny or depressing.