“What do words mean to you?”, someone asked me. The obvious
answer would be ‘whatever they mean’, I wondered. Do we feel words or do we just
see or read them as text? Can we stretch their boundaries in the tangible world
to mean something more than their lexicographic meaning? How do we process them
while saying, or in more sophisticated terms, uttering them?
After much thought and time, I attempt to answer some of
these simple-appearing but miraculously complex questions through the prism of
my experience. First one first. Yes, we feel something while stumbling upon a
word in question. But that’s not the word but its meaning. We feel the underlying
meaning in its entirety; going into it are our neurons, hormones and the like.
It’s as if the brain constructs a story around each word which it unfolds the
moment our eyes encounter it. That is to say, if there’s lack of imagination, there’s
also the accompanying lack of cognitive ability to retain a vocabulary.
Can we bring words alive? I’d prefer to answer this question
following an instinctive chain of thought in my mind. And the answer, as it
appears, is ‘No’. What we can pump life into are not words but thoughts and
emotions. They are the purest manifestation of the human brain. By thoughts, I
don’t mean conscious thoughts, to think which it is necessary to depend on
words. The kind of thoughts I mean are subconscious in nature. These are felt
in their distilled form without the eventual contamination of words. These are
the ones that trigger corresponding emotions. In brief, we think and emote –
two juxtaposing phenomena without the intervention of words.
All said and done, what goes into speaking words? Well,
words, at both a superficial level and deeper one, appear to be nothing but
symbols (written) and pronunciations (verbal) that we are expected to mug up. An
extrapolation of this statement would be to say that learning a language is
mugging up. The smarter you are, more is the alacrity with which words find
themselves at your disposal. In a way, it appears to me as if there are two
entities residing in one human body. One is the linguistically conscious self
and the other is the one which the world perceives. It is ‘this self’ that actuates
the spoken or written word. For instance, when we quote someone while speaking,
we mightn’t consciously recognize the meaning of each word but we do keep a tab
on what the whole thing means. While doing so, the former self processes the
meaning of all words discretely and forms an idea of what the whole sequence of
words means while the latter self transforms this mental image in an outward
manifestation in the form of mechanical narration. One entity thinks while the
other acts rather robotically – the first one is analogous to a desktop and the
second, a printer.
I am not sure if it’s a touch complicated or it only appears
to be so. Regardless, it is what my mind feeds me up with day in day out. The
wonder is if we are so adept at the act of rote-learning, what gives some
people a distinctive sense of good language? The bigger question is, if by way
of evolution we become telepathic in the sense of conveying thoughts and
emotions in their most pristine form, words will cease to exist. At that point,
you’ll ask, “What do thoughts and emotions mean to you?”. And that’s going to
be a difficult question to answer.
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