Language is Literally Magic

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I find language fascinating.

Today I’d like to share three things about language that I don’t think most people realize. And if they have realized these things, they easily forget. Even I do, sometimes. 

To be fair, I don’t fluently speak any besides English, but I know small numbers of words in a very large variety of languages. And every single one that I learn anything about has something spectacularly cool about it. They all find such different ways to communicate similar thoughts, feelings, and knowledge. 

There is something that all languages have in common, though, no matter what part of the world it started in, or what linguistic category it belongs to. Every language that is either spoken/used or written by living people can do something that is literally magic:

By making a series of sounds, hand movements, or squiggles on a page, we can transfer things out of my brain and into yours. I’m doing it right now.

I had a series of brainwaves zip around inside my gray matter, and because I made some shapes on a device, now the same brainwaves are happening in yours.

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, just because we know how it works doesn’t mean it’s not magic.

Now, our messages don’t always transfer flawlessly.

THING #1: Each human being on the planet has slightly different DNA structure in their brains. Combine that with slightly different life experiences, and voila. Chaos. 

Every brain in the whole world is essentially running its own unique operating system. Some systems convert data between themselves without too much trouble. Others can barely manage simple ideas without ending up with horrific conversion errors and miscommunications.

That’s just the way brains work. We all see and interpret things just a tiny bit differently. And even when we come remarkably close to understanding the original speaker, it’s still never going to be exact. 

I think we don’t realize that very often. We tend to think that the words we say will always mean the same thing to someone else as they do to us. That’s what causes the things that are most important to us to also be the things that become most divisive. Religion. Politics. Morality. Lifestyle choices. 

But despite this inherent, omnipresent risk of conversion error, language can also do the opposite. In a single hand gesture, or 2–3 audible syllables, or a few scribbles on a page, we can connect more closely than we’d ever be able to without language.

When someone says “Thank you” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you”, our brainwaves sync up just a little bit more. We connect just that much more closely. 

You know something that makes language even more magical? That we can make those sounds, motions, or squiggles mean new things just by ordering them differently. 

We can make our sounds convey completely different information just by changing the volume we say them in. We can instill our words with intense implications based entirely on how our bodies are standing when we say or type or signal them. 

And the funniest part about that? (To me, anyway.) 

THING #2: That it is literally impossible to separate language from that context without losing most of its potency. Even in ancient, no-longer-spoken languages, we can find voice and tone and implication that make the messages they speak more nuanced than we could possibly have imagined. 

And when we do lose that context to history? So much of the message is also lost or changed.

I don’t think that I have ever, in my 34 years of life, seen or heard an argument where this didn’t come into play. Especially on the internet. Flame wars are FAMOUS for this nonsense. 

Someone will inevitably say something rich in tone, implication, and often vitriol. As humans, we pick up on this, even if we don’t know we’re doing it. Even in text. But the moment someone does pick up on the tone, the original speaker will throw an absolute fit about not literally having said any of that, and not actually being interpreted correctly, and they DEMAND that their words are taken at face value only.

Guess what? We literally can’t. It’s actually, factually impossible to communicate human-to-human without body language, tone, context, and connotation. Even the choice of word order changes everything.

Believing otherwise is honestly absurd.

(And I sincerely believe that most of these internet trolls/45th presidents of the United States don’t ACTUALLY believe it can be done, either. Not if they were to give it any honest thought. I believe that they are just looking for loopholes. Things to stack in their favor, so that their side of the argument holds more weight. It’s a tactic, not a logical, reasonable thing to expect of anyone.)

I’ll be honest, I don’t have a particularly good transition into thing #3. Sorry.

Most people I know think it’s silly that I care so much about proper communication. When I agonize over the utter illiteracy of my facebook friends, or judge political candidates based on how badly their platform blurbs are written in the election guides, I’m called phrases like “anal retentive” or “grammar nazi”. 

That makes me sad, but not because the phrases themselves are inaccurate, per se. It’s more their implication. That unseen, somewhat amorphous context and connotation that we can’t shake from phrases, even if we use them with innocent intent.

Saying that my attention to communication is silly implies that communication itself doesn’t matter very much. That clarity of speech and form is useless. That miscommunication in itself is not the major cause of half of history’s horrific tragedies, if not more.

Saying that language isn’t very important is to deny that our abilities to communicate with one another are, in fact, magic. Some of the oldest magic that humankind has created. Older than fire. Older than wheels. Older than the ability to domesticate animals or farm grains.

Before any of that, we started to communicate with each other. We have prehistoric humans communicating to us across millennia because they left cave drawings that still exist in the year 2019.

THING #3: Communication is truly one of the most magical things a human can do.

Think about it. Everything that stirs our souls in art or music or writing is one human communicating ideas from their brains to ours. And if, as they say, art is what we stay alive for, then does it not follow that language—no matter the media—is the lifeblood of what it means to be human?

But to appreciate it—to truly use our magical superpowers for good and not evil—we have to first recognize what we’re dealing with. 

We have to recognize our different processing systems. We have to recognize the context of what we are saying, and we have to take responsibility for it. We have to actively realize and accept that our words will always have context and tone and connotation that cannot be stripped. 

We have to recognize that communication is vital to being human, and that care and consideration matter, when we speak, write, or gesture. That the things we say will affect people for good or ill, whether or not we mean them to. 

We have to recognize that our ability to communicate with others is the single most powerful and dangerous part of the human race. Atom bombs and genocides and horrifically bloody wars have never once happened without language first being used to convince others that those things were necessary. Not a single instance. 

With great power comes great responsibility. How will you wield yours?

When a Book Changes Your Life - The Hunger Games

If you get emotionally involved in a story, then it's a good book.

If you can read it a second or third time, and still be just as invested, if not more, then it is a great book.

If your life is irrevocably altered for the better because of what you read, then it is literature of the highest quality. 

Last summer I finished reading The Hunger Games for the second time, and it literally changed everything. 

The movie premiered this past week, so I thought it was a good time to revisit my old blog post. I especially feel that the timing is right, because of some of the anti-Hunger Games sentiment that is going around. 

Every major book is going to have its revilers. For Harry Potter, it was the witchcraft thing. For the Hunger Games it happens to be the brutal combat-to-the-death of 24 teenagers. 

For obvious reasons, I understand where they're coming from. You want me to read a book about young kids being forced to fight each other in a gladiator-esque arena? No thank you. 

I know a lot of people who don't want to read the series because of this. I've even heard people calling it "spiritually damaging." But it's actually the exact opposite. 

I'd go so far as to say that:

The Hunger Games is inspiring and spiritually enlightening.  

Yes, violent things happen. Yes, adorable 12 year old girls get brutally murdered. Yes, people watch it like a sick reality tv show. 

The plot is disturbing. But it's not what the book is about. It's about kids who have to be strong to survive in a hard world. It's about people standing up for their rights. It's about a girl who would offer herself up for certain death, just to protect her little sister. 

Those bad things happen in the plot because they have to be overcome. 

All of those things are inspiring enough to spawn half a dozen blog posts. But there's more. Something that I think we often forget, but I hope I never will. Not after last June. 

As I said, I was re-reading The Hunger Games. The book was awesome enough the first time. That second time though, I really got into it. I already knew the characters and what was going to happen, but I still spent the whole time covering my face and wishing that it would change. Sadly, it didn't. Things still happened, and I still cried.

About ten minutes later, in my after-book stupor, I didn't really know what to do with myself. As usual, I replayed the book over and over in my head, but I'm a multi-tasker by nature. I needed something unobtrusive to do while I analyzed everything. 

I hadn't had dinner, so even though I wasn't particularly hungry, I got in the car and started driving. I didn't feel like having anything I passed, and I ended up at Walmart.

As I drove, I began to be impressed by the sheer absurdity of traffic. How people get so mad at other people, or get so obsessed about their precious cars. I'd thought about that kind of stuff before, so it wasn't new, but it was on my mind more than usual.

Then I walked in through the door of Walmart, and I was suddenly hit with a wave of disgust.

I walked past four or five drink machines, two crane machines, and a red box. The commercialism almost overwhelmed me. The flashy labels. The lights. The totally unnecessary products, and the billions of dollars spent in marketing them.

I have to be honest, I almost turned around and walked right back out then and there. But I needed groceries. So I entered the store itself.

Rows and rows of food, piled up for anyone's taking. Dozens of racks with shirts and pants and jackets and socks. Aisles filled with the most advanced toys a kid could ask for. Video games, movies, cell phones, cameras, TVs, laptops.

I felt like a Capital yuppie.

All I needed were a few clueless people. Selfish, arrogant, decorated and clothed according to fashions, and oblivious to the bounty around them... oh wait, Wal-mart had those too. In abundance. Hundreds of them milling about. Complaining about how hard life is while filling their carts without even a thought.

Isn't it scary? How different are we really? Suzanne Collins might have exaggerated a bit when she wrote the Capitol citizens. But only a bit. A very little bit.

I take so much for granted, and I am guilty of emphasizing things that aren't really important. I'd realized that before, but it never hit me on such a deep, extremely real level.

I was disgusted. Almost to the point of nausea.

There really aren't any words that convey the depth of my revulsion for the society in which I found myself. Suffice it to say that I was shocked in a way that I have never been shocked before.

It's been almost a year since then. I am once again capable of shopping in Wal-mart without puking. I almost wish that I wasn't. If it weren't for that silly thing about needing to eat to stay alive... 

Every time I read the books, I remember that night. And every time, I remember that I am not starving. I have clothes. I have shelter. I have the right to vote. 

I have piles of food. Literally. High quality, disease free, pre-harvested piles of food, to be more specific. And how often do we walk past this without even realizing how fantastic it is?

So word to the wise: Don't go to Wal-mart 5 minutes after reading The Hunger Games. Or better yet, DO. 

Writing is hard. Why do you do it?

I've heard a lot of different reasons for writing. I want to be famous. I want to get rich like J. K. Rowling. I want to work from my home when my kids are asleep. They run the gamut.

But by far, the most common response I hear is:

"I write for me."

Without accusing these people of lying, I ask: What does that even mean?

I'm not being sarcastic here. I really want to know. Because I sure don't spend hours typing, and correcting, and re-reading, and correcting again, and banging my head into the wall just "for me". I don't get it.

When I do say that to myself, it comes across in one of two ways.

1) A pretentious way of saying "You didn't want to publish me? Well screw you. I didn't write it to be published anyway."

2) As a self defense mechanism. "I actually do want to be published more than anything in the world, but if I tell people that I only write for me, then it won't be so crushing when I get rejection letters."

Whatever the case, though, writing is hard. And to do it well takes a lot of work. "I write for me" isn't strong enough on its own to justify all that work. People who say it must have more specific reasons. I just don't know what they are.

Why do I write?

I have a crippling shyness. It is a real process to get me warmed up in a crowd of people that I don't know.

And then when you do get me talking, I don't shut up. On, and on, and on, and on, about things that they really didn't need to know. (My blogs are more like my talking than my writing.) I've shocked a lot of people that way. They never see it coming. The energizer bunny of rambling.

Let's just say I'm really bad with people. The Supreme Chancellor of All Awkwardness.

And yet, unlike a lot of writers, I am not all that introverted. I need people. I need to communicate with people. To connect with them, and share ideas with them. Everything about me works better when I have someone else there to help me.

As you can see, this creates quite a problem.

That's why writing is perfect for me. I can share ideas, tell a story, make someone laugh or cry. I can connect with someone. But I can type it out, read it a few hundred times, and make sure it says the right thing first.

"I just write for me" will never work in my case. Because I NEED the audience. I need to be heard. I need to be responded to. And writing is the only way I can do that effectively.

I write because I need to communicate.

Why do you write? If "I write for me" is applicable, what does it actually mean to you?