words like soap bubbles
March 30, 2007
this is going to make very little sense i can assure you. recently i heard from some possibly credible internet source that the approximate number of words in the english language has increased more than five fold in the last four hundred years. people base what they know on things that already exist and build forward. we use language that exists to think about articulating things that have no words assigned to them yet. just now i was going to use the word pentuple to describe the term 'five fold'. i didn't because it's not listed in the dictionary. octupled is. so is centupled. maybe i'm thinking about the word structure incorrectly. the point is, the resolution of the language is constantly increasing. just like in visual medium, resolution is not a measurement of accuracy compared to some ultimate accuracy. resolution is a way to describe a level of detail. as resolution increases, an image is said to be more detailed; however, that does not infer that there is a resolution that describes perfect clarity. that section was briefly thought through. here's what i am coming to. king crimson, a band i sometimes listen to, has a line in one of their songs that reads 'have to be happy with what you have to be happy with'. the way that it is presented, the first clause means something quite different than the second, although the wording is exactly the same. after i thought about this for a few minutes, i started thinking about the difference of the uses of the word 'have'. to have an object. i have to get this done. you have to go. you have my bike. when i use 'have' to represent an obligation i pronounce the 'v' more like an 'f''. this really tripped me out. like so many colored dots can capture a rough copy of what something looks like; so many words can capture a basic representation of what i am attempting to communicate. when i practice thinking of the different implications of the word 'have', it feels like the essence of my intention is being forced into vessels; in some cases, two very different meanings simply lack separate vessels, and must share one. this is common knowledge, but witnessing it by saying words side by side with the same pronunciation but different meaning feels limiting and strange.
Tags for this piece: creative article language semantics