a lot lately. Recently all of my English courses this semester seem to blend into one another and it is like I am in one big English course of 100 people. It is not that they don’t each stand out on their own but we are all talking a lot about language and what all it does for us. So I then started to think, how does language restrict us? Is that even possible? I personally think that it can.
I love writing. Truly I spend a majority of my days writing poetry or blogging. However, as someone who values words just like anything you love, there are possibilities to hate it. For example, the other day I had lunch with a friend. I was telling her a story and I got fixated on one phrase that I just couldn’t think of. I tried to express the emotion I was trying to convey without this phrase but nothing seemed to be doing it for me so after 20 minutes went by of us brainstorming (Luckily she is an English nerd like I am) I gave up and told her that eventually I would text her what I was meaning to say. Do you know how frustrating that is? I’m sure you do. All of us are college students who I am sure have at some point in their career raised their hand in class only to have blah come out of their mouth. An incomprehensible chuck of words come out and you stammer out a, “you know what I mean”. This happens to me almost every day. I blame language for this. If it wasn’t for me knowing key phrases that get straight to the point of an emotion that is almost universal I wouldn’t have thought about one phrase for 20 minutes. I would have moved on with one of the many synonyms we came up with and would have been done.
Another example, every time I write a poem. The end. The point of writing poetry is using language uniquely. Poets are obsessed with finding the perfect combination of words. It is exhausting, my brain is constantly thinking that their are better words out there than the words I have been using for the last 22 years and that I need to discover new ones. Having this mind set can tear the joy of writing right of its fleshy bones.
Our fascination with language and words is something that is beautiful and amazing but sometimes also limits us. Forces us to think too much instead of going with that first word you think of (which growing up I was told was always the right one…clearly I’ve been doing that wrong).
What do others think? Are there any other ways that language can limit us? Is there a way to communicate emotions/ideas/etc. out there? Though language is important is there any time that you almost wish it didn’t exist?
YES. This happens to me all of the time. I tend to think that it’s because I’m either anxious or over-occupied with other things, but maybe it’s just a feature of learning or being.
I’m glad I am not the only one who has numb brain syndrome. I swear that this is changes how I look words. That I am one to get so caught up in the “perfect phrase” that I limit myself from other phrases that could be equivalent. I believe we had a discussion about this during our workshop about who created the rule that the same word can’t be within the same paragraph and how if that is the word you would like to use than use it. That conversation was something that provoked my thoughts about how I and many others get caught up on words.
I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. I’m usually pretty good with my words in class or with my friends and family, but anytime it comes to anything involving emotions I just seem to be at a loss for words. It’s easy enough to tell someone that you’re upset, that you’re happy, or that you love them, but I always get the sense that my word wasn’t spot on with how I felt. It just seems like there’s always a 15 syllable word that will perfectly describe how you’re feeling, but sadly we’re limited to the vocabulary that we’ve acquired so far. It just seems like there’s something lost in the translation.