What Language!

Thinking of a way to make one’s interlocutor say something, and  yet avoid being pushy, it occurs that saying something in whatever language could correspond to an utterance in another language, as long as the content  is akin to the color of the thought that invites such a dialogue. Thus, one can swear saying “Good morning, can I have a pound of oranges, please,” if that sentence is produced in the tone normally indicating swearing. Likewise, one can say something that, if written down, loses the weight that the lightness of the expression attaches to it.

Such verbalizations can be exchanged in different ways. Among them, there are those that one routinely  uses to address whoever needs to be addressed. Others can be somewhat atypical. But nice. And yet, even among such weird means of communication, some can hardly be rivaled by any other. Only, not always do they find ways of reaching the ear that needs to hear them.

If a person says: “I’ll be with you in a second,” only the context, for example a shop, can reveal the actual meaning of those words, that otherwise, literally understood, can inspire misinterpretation and be misleading in potentially indicating verbal contact of a completely different kind.  Needless to say, that kind of semantic wandering is beyond dissatisfactory.

Another example of language peculiarity is deliberately coating one’s thought with an ambiguous linguistic decoration. As long as it is done in the tradition of Mon-T-Pay-T-oN, that’s cool. If it’s not, then it, more often than not, successfully provokes confusing reactions and stirs undesirable emotions. In the long run, more often than not, the success is nothing but.

Thus, one speaks, talks, says, utters, pronounces, expresses, explains, describes, narrate, orate…in language. Elusive language, that betrays even its own purpose. And it irritates the source that is trying to sustain the correlation between the clarity of thought and that of its verbal equivalent. Unsuccessfully so. It degrades one’s idea of language as an elevated human invention. It distorts one’s hopes that there is something inalienably human and that something be not so humanly imperfect as to deviate the very notion of the human. It crushes one’s romanticized image of the species as something unique. It defeats a possibility of sharing a sense of communality with cyborg-comrade-fellow-Travelers. But, having shown multiple grotesque faces, it turns once more, only to spill a smile of a thousand suns over an electrocuted heart of the frustrated language-user. Because language, except  for being so decisively arrogant and mercilessly disobedient, is also a gentle broisther and protective mafother.