I like language a lot. It’s flexible and mutable. Really, language is a living thing influenced by time, place, and context to a degree that almost no one comprehends while they’re actually using it. But a letter I got in the mail Friday got me to thinking about the limitations of language and how we use it. Take sand.<\/p>\n
Because we don’t live in Dickens’ circumscribed world all a writer has to do to give you a picture of sand is use the word sand. Chances are even if you’ve never been to a beach you’ve probably seen a picture of one or seen one in a movie which means the word sand has, at least, denotative meaning<\/a> for you. Sands of time, sands through the hourglass, sandy shores, all of these are idioms that conjure up what Merriam-Webster rightly and rather blandly describes as “a loose granular material that results from the disintegration of rocks, consists of particles smaller than gravel but coarser than silt.”<\/p>\n But what color is it?<\/p>\n See, here is where how we use language gets interesting. One of the denotative definitions of sand is “a yellowish-gray color.” Except that depending upon your experiences sand can be black<\/a>, red<\/a>, white<\/a>, green<\/a>, or pink<\/a>.<\/p>\n What I find curious is not that we limit the word sand to a single color when the actual article the word describes manifestly comes in more hues. We limit the definitions of words all the time – obscene and p*rn*gr*ph*c to pick the two most egregious examples. No, what peaks my interest is why we limit definitions.<\/p>\n Is it because the other instances of a particular thing – like a black sand beach – are so specific and rare that by the time someone found one sand was being used to describe the most common sort, you know, the kind that comes in varying shades of tan<\/a>, that the only thing to be done to describe this new place was to prepend a color to the word sand?<\/p>\n Or do we limit the definitions of words because this great thing we invented to communicate with each other actually outstrips our abilities as a species to use it to communicate? Are complex ideas starting to exceed our capacity to understand them?<\/p>\n I like to think my facility with language is on the high end of the scale for my time and place. I certainly can’t compare to some of the giants in the field who spend their lives studying words, using words, and sussing out what words mean in different contexts but that doesn’t keep me from being interested in how we use them.<\/p>\n