LINGUISTIC BANTER

Forgive me in advance for the rant, but I think it is interesting to think about the way we talk about language. We say things like: “it didn’t quite come across”, “I failed to convey the meaning”, “the book contains rich language”, “I didn’t comprehend the meaning of what he just said”. Because if you come to think of it, these sayings – the way we talk and think about language – seem to imply that words or sentences or books themselves ‘magically contain their meaning’. As if, when I’m speaking to you, I take a word, open it up somehow and insert meaning into it. This word +content then travels straight from the mental concept in my head to your mind, where you somehow ‘unpack the completely intact and original meaning’.
This is of course nonsense! Meaning is never unambiguous nor entirely original from one mind to the other
A way more realistic way of thinking about language would be to imagine yourself in a separate environment, a compound if you will. High and thick walls surround it, no one can visit, nor can you send material directly from one compound to the other. The only way of communicating is by sending little notes, descriptions of the material that your environment is filled up with.
The other person, upon receiving the note, has to take painstaking effort to decipher it, imagine what it is the other person is talking about, imagine what the original material looks like, construct a mental replica if you will.
What I am trying to say is that effective communication takes huge effort and practice! Naturally, the goal of language is essentially to narrow down the possible amount of interpretations. The more specific your utterance (just a fancy umbrella term for your words, gestures, body language, anything that helps you communicate), the more likely the other person is to understand you!
Say you ask me if I want a drink. I am, however eating soup, and thus don’t want the drink. I could in essence just point at the bowl of soup I’m eating and leave you to dry. Or I could say “no, thank you, I’m having soup, I won’t take a drink”
So, language is essentially just a disambiguation of context, not a magic traffic system meaning can use to intactly traffic from my head to yours. These weird letters you see here – weird black dots on a screen – mean nothing in itself unless you reconstruct them in your own mind, using the contextual, linguistic and environmental knowledge you have at your disposal – trying as well as you can to get into the head of the author, to understand the mental material he was working with when he wrote what he did. However complicated this might sound, it all goes unconsciously, we do it every single minute of the day! And that is rather the wonder of poetry, of literature – it means nothing in itself, but yet amounts to so very much. Isn’t cognition wonderful

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