Word Obsessions
When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher played a piece of classical music for us. I don't remember exactly which one it was; but it was big, crashing, a whole orchestra going at forte. I liked it. At that age, I liked dramatic music the best, though I do remember being introduced to the concept of a fugue that year, and enjoying the repetition of the familiar theme.
When the music was done playing, our teacher asked us, "What did the music make you think of?", nobody could give a good answer. Three kids said, "It made me think of an orchestra," or "I was conducting an orchestra."
I could go into a tirade on how kids aren't being taught about good music these days, except for one thing: I didn't have an answer to that question, either, and I've been "taught about good music" since I was very little. My mother used to sing in a classical choir. My grandmother loves opera and taught me how to sing properly. My father, apparently, had either perfect pitch or such a good ear for relative pitch and memory for reference tones that it amounted to the same thing. I was singing on-pitch by three, harmonizing instinctively by nine, arranging music in my teens (I've never really had the creativity to compose anything new)... I've been thoroughly exposed to good music.
So what was the problem? Why couldn't my sixth-grade class--including music-loving me--answer the question, "What did the music make you think of?"
Answer... We simply didn't have the words for it. Some people might say that that's a pity, that we'd gain the vocabulary later, that it's an expected deficiency one finds in youngsters, to be unable to translate music to words; but I don't think we really needed any words. To answer that question, all we needed to do was re-play the music, point to the stereo, and say, "That was what it made me think of."
And my teacher--who was pretty good at teaching--didn't get that. He wanted words.
Words aren't the direct experience of anything. They can only serve to summarize, to match roughly between an experience and an inexact vocabulary with words that refer to similar experiences. Take the word "love". There are so many connections to that word that it's totally ambiguous. You can say, "I love you", and mean a hundred thousand different things. And yet people fixate on being told, "I love you", by children or by romantic partners... even though "I love you" doesn't say very much about the experience of love at all.
It's not just "fuzzy" words, either. Take the word, "tree". Refer to a tree by the word, and you get a vague image of a plant with a woody stem and some sort of leaf. But Tree isn't the word; it's the full experience of Tree... the unexpected coolness of leaves, the mesmerizing pattern of light through the branches, the chemistry of its life, the physics of water transport and roots, its part in the ecosystem, the way it grows, the sentimental attachment someone may have to it... The word refers to a hundred thousand things; and they are different for any given tree. To really talk about a tree, you would have to take your friend out to the forest, place his hand on its trunk, and say, "Here. This is what I mean."
People are fixated on words. They want to pin everything down, categorize it in these vague boxes of "music" and "tree" and "love". You see it when they look at abstract art: "What does it mean?" they ask. "What does it represent? What does it symbolize?" Everything has to mean something, has to connect to a word. People don't seem to be very quick to realize that something can just be made to exist for its own sake, for the experience of interacting with it--like the music I heard in the sixth grade.
I don't, quite, think in words. When I think, "tree", the concept of a tree is a broad, branching thing, connected to a hundred thousand different ideas. Only one of those ideas is the word, "tree". The concept is at the base of everything. That's why I say I'm a "conceptual" thinker--I don't think in words, nor quite in visual images, but in concepts, in connections. I'm sure just about everybody uses concepts to some extent; that's how word-association games work (and yet, even that they insist on using words to express!). But for me, it's my main mode of thinking. I translate to written words, or to speech.
That's why I have such a large vocabulary. Language is the most efficient way to transfer information from one mind to another; and I've always been very aware of just how complex things are, and how clumsy language is. You can never say anything exactly; to find words as precise as possible is the next best thing. A lot of people do it by using non-verbal communication to clarify their vague verbal communication; I use words as close to the concept as I can get them. Lawyers and scientists use very precise words for that reason: The concept is more complex than the words available; so more words must be invented, or words must be given precise definitions.
People seem to lose a lot of their direct-experience thinking pretty early on--maybe they start losing it as soon as they learn language. For the socially oriented, language takes a position of supreme importance. Language serves to crystallize ideas--to cut off the extraneous branches of the concept, to bundle them into neat packages. It can be used to think precisely, to focus on only one path of a million possible; concepts are unwieldy and not many of them can be held in the mind at the same time. And yet... without language... there's the experience. A tree is just as truly a tree when nobody ever gives it a name. The experience of music exists, even when sixth-grade students can't describe it. And love is truly love, even when nobody labels it.
Language is useful--very useful--for internal and external communication. But I think, much of the time, people with word obsessions lose the idea that words are nowhere near the real thing.
When the music was done playing, our teacher asked us, "What did the music make you think of?", nobody could give a good answer. Three kids said, "It made me think of an orchestra," or "I was conducting an orchestra."
I could go into a tirade on how kids aren't being taught about good music these days, except for one thing: I didn't have an answer to that question, either, and I've been "taught about good music" since I was very little. My mother used to sing in a classical choir. My grandmother loves opera and taught me how to sing properly. My father, apparently, had either perfect pitch or such a good ear for relative pitch and memory for reference tones that it amounted to the same thing. I was singing on-pitch by three, harmonizing instinctively by nine, arranging music in my teens (I've never really had the creativity to compose anything new)... I've been thoroughly exposed to good music.
So what was the problem? Why couldn't my sixth-grade class--including music-loving me--answer the question, "What did the music make you think of?"
Answer... We simply didn't have the words for it. Some people might say that that's a pity, that we'd gain the vocabulary later, that it's an expected deficiency one finds in youngsters, to be unable to translate music to words; but I don't think we really needed any words. To answer that question, all we needed to do was re-play the music, point to the stereo, and say, "That was what it made me think of."
And my teacher--who was pretty good at teaching--didn't get that. He wanted words.
Words aren't the direct experience of anything. They can only serve to summarize, to match roughly between an experience and an inexact vocabulary with words that refer to similar experiences. Take the word "love". There are so many connections to that word that it's totally ambiguous. You can say, "I love you", and mean a hundred thousand different things. And yet people fixate on being told, "I love you", by children or by romantic partners... even though "I love you" doesn't say very much about the experience of love at all.
It's not just "fuzzy" words, either. Take the word, "tree". Refer to a tree by the word, and you get a vague image of a plant with a woody stem and some sort of leaf. But Tree isn't the word; it's the full experience of Tree... the unexpected coolness of leaves, the mesmerizing pattern of light through the branches, the chemistry of its life, the physics of water transport and roots, its part in the ecosystem, the way it grows, the sentimental attachment someone may have to it... The word refers to a hundred thousand things; and they are different for any given tree. To really talk about a tree, you would have to take your friend out to the forest, place his hand on its trunk, and say, "Here. This is what I mean."
People are fixated on words. They want to pin everything down, categorize it in these vague boxes of "music" and "tree" and "love". You see it when they look at abstract art: "What does it mean?" they ask. "What does it represent? What does it symbolize?" Everything has to mean something, has to connect to a word. People don't seem to be very quick to realize that something can just be made to exist for its own sake, for the experience of interacting with it--like the music I heard in the sixth grade.
I don't, quite, think in words. When I think, "tree", the concept of a tree is a broad, branching thing, connected to a hundred thousand different ideas. Only one of those ideas is the word, "tree". The concept is at the base of everything. That's why I say I'm a "conceptual" thinker--I don't think in words, nor quite in visual images, but in concepts, in connections. I'm sure just about everybody uses concepts to some extent; that's how word-association games work (and yet, even that they insist on using words to express!). But for me, it's my main mode of thinking. I translate to written words, or to speech.
That's why I have such a large vocabulary. Language is the most efficient way to transfer information from one mind to another; and I've always been very aware of just how complex things are, and how clumsy language is. You can never say anything exactly; to find words as precise as possible is the next best thing. A lot of people do it by using non-verbal communication to clarify their vague verbal communication; I use words as close to the concept as I can get them. Lawyers and scientists use very precise words for that reason: The concept is more complex than the words available; so more words must be invented, or words must be given precise definitions.
People seem to lose a lot of their direct-experience thinking pretty early on--maybe they start losing it as soon as they learn language. For the socially oriented, language takes a position of supreme importance. Language serves to crystallize ideas--to cut off the extraneous branches of the concept, to bundle them into neat packages. It can be used to think precisely, to focus on only one path of a million possible; concepts are unwieldy and not many of them can be held in the mind at the same time. And yet... without language... there's the experience. A tree is just as truly a tree when nobody ever gives it a name. The experience of music exists, even when sixth-grade students can't describe it. And love is truly love, even when nobody labels it.
Language is useful--very useful--for internal and external communication. But I think, much of the time, people with word obsessions lose the idea that words are nowhere near the real thing.