The Roman Refrigerator

 I will try to transcribe here something that I encountered recently on Twitter:

"as someone who studies linguistics, i will never not laugh when someone says 'that word doesn't exist' like, my good bitch. if a word is regularly used by a certain amount of people then it exists."

I often wonder why it is considered admirable to treat language with such disrespect. Would it be considered the mark of a good swordsman, let's say, that he never sharpened his blade, actively blunted it and, indeed, left it out in the rain to go rusty? But if I express impatience with a student of linguistics who misuses the full-stop (for example), I know what kind of rejoinder I can expect.

The same person continues:

"if it has its own grammatical rules then its [sic] perfectly valid. it's part of their lexicon now, sweetie. 'It's a made up word' honey all words are made up. Linguists didn't just fucking excavate athens and were like BEHOLD!!! VOCABULARY!!"

Then:

 "dictionaries are not rule books, they're record books. 'Refrigerate' didn't exist 200 years ago and yet here we are."

Now, there is something to be said in defence of some of what I have quoted, but I think that the overall message is a gross simplification. It seems to me too close to something like, "Trust me, I'm a student of history--history is a load of rubbish. It's all just about dead people and stuff."

What I would particularly like to challenge is the idea that all language is "made up". There's a question, of course, as to what the phrasal verb 'make up' means. In the above, it's linked with the idea of something not being real, the suggestion being that it is fictional or the product of a whim. Whether language--nouns in particular--is like this is the topic of Plato's Cratylus, that I am currently reading. I would like to respond to our anonymous student's assertions with the words of Cratylus himself:

"But, Hermogenes, do you really think that any subject can be taught or learned so quickly, not to mention one like this, which seems to be among the most important?"

To dispose of the subject by saying that it's all "made up" is precisely to believe it can be learned and taught quickly (after all, if it's made up, there are no rules) and is to deny the importance of the subject. And why would you be studying the subject if that is your attitude? 

Let's take the example of the word 'refrigerate', as given by the student. In fact, the etymology dictionary tells us that it's more than 200 years old:

Etymology of 'refrigerate'.

"1530s, back-formation from refrigeration, or else from Latin refrigeratus, past participle of refrigerare 'make cool or cold.'"

The Latin roots themselves should have been a clue here to the fact that the word, even if it represented a new combination of elements and even if it was applied to something newly invented, is nonetheless not new in its linguistic materials. It is not as if when the refrigerator was invented, the inventor (if there was a single inventor) played with cut-out letters of the alphabet to try and come up with a word that sounded nice to him. No, in this case the word was more or less fully formed and was given a new application based on its existing meaning. 

In Cratylus, Plato has Socrates trying to go back to the very origins of language, not just pondering the question of what elements current compound words were made, but also pondering the question of how the original elements came to mean anything in the first place. No one knows how language first emerged. (Tell me if I'm wrong here.) There seems to be a kind of mystery about it, similar to the mystery surrounding the emergence of self-awareness. One way of articulating the mystery is this: it seems impossible to invent a language from scratch. You might put together a new language, such as Esperanto, but it will be using already existing elements. We cannot imagine prehistoric humans sitting around the campfire saying, "Well, what will we call this orangey thing?" In other words, I can say with some feeling and even some conviction, no! language is not just made up.

I hope to write more in relation to Cratylus before long.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Dark and Stormy Night

  It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.  I wonder if you will recognise this. It is the opening sentence of the novel Paul Clifford , by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I have just seen Bulwer-Lytton's name brought up, and the above sentence quoted, in response to the question, "Who have been the world's worst published writers?" I have not read more of Bulwer-Lytton than a few quotes such as that above, but I cannot think he really deserves to be numbered among 'the world's worst published writers'. Tellingly, the person who quoted the above did not give any reason why we are supposed to consider this such bad writing, apart from mentioning that the opening phrase is a cliché...
Read more

In Passing

 Some sentences tell us a great deal, not because of their essential information, but because of the way they are phrased, or their context. It is possible to learn something new from a book even if it does not present you with any new facts, because of the way the facts are assembled and because of the phrasing used in presenting the facts. I found the following sentences, from Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations , quite piquant: In the nineteenth century successful industrialization and emigration reduced the political impact of young populations in European societies. The proportions of youth rose again in the 1920s, however, providing recruits to fascist and other extremist movements.
Read more

Simplicity in Writing

 I've just read a little of this article in the Times Literary Supplement , written by one of the cultural scions of Messrs Strunk and White: Plain Speaking - How to Write Well I do have some sympathy with writing plainly and maximising the virtues of the demotic Anglo-Saxon (in a way that I have not done in this sentence), but I can't help thinking there's a pathology posing as common sense in a lot of this hand-wringing about simplicity.   For instance, from the opening paragraph:   "Our teacher is a seasoned journalist who insists that we learn how to edit our own prose ruthlessly. (If he saw this paragraph, he would cut 'seasoned' – a cliché – as well as all the words ending with -ly.)"   She goes on to say that her teacher would eschew not only obvious jargon, but anything "long and Latinate".   Is this not a kind of stylistic hair shirt, the pursuing of rules for their own sake? Just take the first sentence of the article's first para...
Read more