Tag Archives: words

The words

Goldfinch sitting on a teasel
Photo by Steve Harris

‘I know the words for everything there is,’ Zak boasted. Theo was walking home from school with him, as he did every day he didn’t have trumpet practice. Zak’s eyes were small marbles in his ruddy, pudgy face. They dared Theo to challenge him.

Theo’s mum said he should ignore Zak’s bragging, and that would make him stop doing it. But somehow Theo couldn’t manage it.

‘You know all the words for all the things?’ he said.

‘Yup.’

‘What’re those, then?’ He nodded toward the flock feeding noisily on teasel seeds at the derelict industrial site.

‘Them? Those are red-face birds,’ Zac proclaimed triumphantly.

‘Wrong!’ Theo said, though the sinking feeling in his gut told him he’d been bested, somehow. ‘They’re goldfinches.’

‘They’re still red-face birds,’ said Zak, ‘And I named ’em first, so I win.’

If that was the game, Theo realised, he was never going to win. He stayed quiet for the rest of the walk, willing himself to notice those things that had no words, that Zak could never name.

Spores

Close up of fly agaric mushroom on a forest floor
Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

Human beings once shared the Earth’s language, having no words of their own.

They’d eventually adopt the new lexicon that appeared one day on the forest floor. Words popped up like mushrooms. 

Red, white, alluring. Probably poisonous. 

Most of the other woodland creatures had the sagacity to avoid them.

Not humans, though. The naked wingless naïfs gobbled up each tumescent word, absorbing the mysteries within.

When they opened their mouths, they released the words into the air. They spread like spores.

The determiners

Newborn baby with its arms outstretched
Photo by Alex Hockett

All Gwyn had ever known was a world where your fate was determined at the age of eleven. 

It would be more precise to say it was determined at the moment of birth.

Everything hung on what the mother said when her newborn took its first breath. Once recorded, the maternal birth word was carefully consigned to the archives until the child’s eleventh birthday. At this point it was passed to the Panel of Determiners, who examined it, rectified any ambiguities and assigned it a word class that would establish the child’s destiny.

Some pregnant women could afford the costly antenatal classes that trained them to call out an auspicious word at just the right moment. Verbs held the most prestige, but their subcategories varied greatly even so. Finite verbs ranked first, with the more complex tense/aspect combinations coming out at the very top. Nouns came second, with adverbs and adjectives sharing third place. New mothers rarely uttered pronouns, prepositions or conjunctions, but the Determiners were prepared for all eventualities.

Interrogatives came low in the rankings. Expletives came last, which was unfortunate for families who could not afford pre-birth linguistic training. Poorer women were the ones most likely to utter a contented ‘Ah!’ or a blissful ‘Oh’ at the sight of their healthy baby. Woe betide the child whose enchanted mother whispered a ‘wow’ at her child’s first breath.

Gwyn was well acquainted with her own birth word. Her mother’s capacity to produce six different expletives for her elder siblings had been a source of much mirth among the extended family. But the seventh took the prize.

Still, Gwyn indulged a hope in a future full of possibilities.

Her mother’s call need not, after all, be interpreted as an expletive.

‘Jesus!’ was also a proper noun.

Prophet noun, she murmurs gently to herself as she stands before the Determiners. Messiah. Saviour of words, saviour of worlds.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 80 of Structured Visions. Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

Wordfall

Photo by Yang Shuo

The most difficult question for most linguists to answer is ‘What’s a word?’

Always, it’s exactly the same.

I’m exhausted by the climb. I stand at the top to catch my breath, to rest my overtaxed muscles. They quiver like jelly. My heart flings itself against my ribcage as if trying to escape.

My body never seems to adjust to the exertion of the climb, no matter how many times I do it. My muscles never grow stronger, my lung capacity never increases, my heart never stabilises.

There’s a sign at the top of the mountain. Sometimes I read it, but I never manage to remember the words printed on it. Observe? Observation? Observatory? And another word that sounds scientific, but which is actually about language. Language observatory? Lexical observatory? Observatoire linguistique?

The sign marks only the halfway point of my journey to the site, but the road levels out here and the going is easier. The view is stunning, when I remember to look.

When I reach the site I inevitably encounter the scientific instruments and the team of people who operate them.

They never used to acknowledge my presence. I’ve since learned they were being cautious about approaching me directly, for fear of scaring me away. Eventually curiosity gets the better of me and I start asking questions.

‘What are these instruments?’

They look a little like radio telescopes, shaped like big bowls, their rims horizontal with the sky.

One day I remember the words on the sign (observe-observation-observatory-observatoire) and ask what they’re observing. 

‘Words,’ they say.

‘What words?’

They point to the sky.

‘The ones that land in our instruments.’

‘Where do they come from?’

‘Outer space.’

‘Wait. You’ve discovered intelligent extraterrestrial life? In outer space? Are they talking to us? What are they saying?’

We’ve had this conversation at least a dozen times, I’m embarrassed to admit. And I can never get it through my thick skull that ‘words from outer space’ aren’t spoken by extraterrestrials, they’re not part of some alien broadcast, they’re not communicated at all. They’re just falling from the sky, like inert little specks, like stardust.

They actually fall into those radio telescope things. It turns out those big bowls are like water butts or reservoirs, capturing words, not rainfall. Wordfall. The sensitive equipment the team uses helps them study each word, to learn its qualities and eventually to decide which ones they want to incorporate into Earth.

When I finally understand that much they hook me up to a network of electrodes so I can know what a word is like. A word is not, it turns out, a combination of letters, or sounds, or symbols of any kind. Words are like…

I don’t know. Every time I try to grasp it I’m back down at the bottom of the mountain again, and I can’t always be bothered to climb back up.

Really, it’s exhausting. Physically and mentally.

Here it is—I’ve got it now. Don’t try to imagine what a word is, or what it means. Better to say words have qualities. They make you feel a certain way. Itchy, or wise, or bereft, or curious. They’re like little blue pulses of energy—zip! They infuse you with some unique way of feeling or thinking—some new idea.

It’s probably twenty more trips up the mountain before I learn how they integrate the new words into Earth. I keep making the mistake of thinking that they’ll translate them into something that sounds like English, Spanish or Inuit. Maybe they’ll use Esperanto. I keep inventing clever little neologisms for the outer-space words I’m experiencing until eventually—poof! It’s straight back down the mountain for me.

It’s actually quite a difficult thing, this business of incorporating new words. The words need a safe space to exist within, and creating that environment takes a lot of calibration. That’s what most of the instrumentation is for, in fact.

And here’s the confusing bit, but it starts to make sense after lots of trips up here. The space that accommodates the new words is made out of language. 

Language is different from words, it turns out. 

Language makes stories. It makes… selves.

That’s it!

Stories and selves—selved stories, self stories? Self stories are containers made out of language, specially calibrated to welcome words from outer space.

‘You’re ready,’ one of them tells me now.

‘Ready for what?’

But I know what they mean. They think I’m ready to be a human storage compartment for one of their alien words.

What have they been doing to me all this time? Have they been messing with me when they’ve hooked me up to their instruments? I’ve changed, somehow. I can’t quite figure it out.

Poof!

The mountain looms ahead of me. I’m at the bottom again. 

This time I won’t go back. Nobody’s making me climb that road again. I’m nobody’s guinea pig.

Half an hour later, I’m standing by that sign again, something-something observatoire, something-something transformation. I can’t read it properly. My lungs feel like they’re about to explode.

It’s OK, though, I’ve done this before. I know the way from here, it’s easy going the rest of the way.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘Wordfall’ in Episode 68 of Structured Visions.