I’ve been thinking a lot lately about words and the English language. Most people don’t think much or at all about the language they speak; that sort of meta-awareness is typically reserved for writers or English professors. I think a major contributor to this reality is also that many people don’t really have a need to examine their mental word bank. Expressing anger or sadness or happiness is completed with ease, using basic words that any non-native English speaker would learn during his/her first month in class. Words like “frustrated” or “content” or “depressed.”
But for those of us who are cursed with meta-consciousness as well as a highly (perhaps over-) developed range of emotions, the usual suspects in the emotion word bank just aren’t cutting it anymore. Thus I bring up something I read in an article called “Lazy Language, Lazy Thought,” which was published on moreintelligentlife.com in 2007:
“The task that suffers most from mangled language is thought, when people communicate with themselves. If they cannot express themselves to themselves, they have no chance of expressing themselves to other people.”
This notion sums up something I’ve personally been experiencing, as well as someone who is very near and dear to me. It’s crazy to think that a language we both have spoken our entire lives could possibly fail us; being unable to adequately express our thoughts and emotions with the very conduit we use to process our lives: English. I began to wonder if there were no words in any language for what we were going through. Being an emotional pioneer isn’t nearly as laudable and inspiring as being a social or a medical pioneer – being alone and paving a way for others in your own head is terrifying. One begins to wonder if they’re actually crazy – if no one else has ever felt this way in the history of humanity, why am I experiencing it?
As it turns out, there are in fact many words in other languages which describe situations and feelings that I’ve encountered but not been able to properly describe with the words I had available to me. One such word is toska, a Russian word whose working definition was written by author Vladimir Nobokov: “At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
I wish I could accurately describe how reassured and relieved I felt when I discovered this word. Toska describes how I’ve felt for most of my adolescent and adult life. The closest I could come to it in the English language in the past wasn’t even a true English word, but a French word we adopted: ennui. I finally felt like somebody somewhere understood exactly what I was going through, even if it was a someone who lived in the cold, harsh Russian steppe a thousand years ago, or however far back the word came into existence.
Confirmation of feeling is like a removal of weight from one’s shoulders. Being understood by someone – anyone – can be a tremendous comfort for a sufferer of existential or internal crises. The problem is even getting to the point where you can enunciate your feelings clearly enough to posit the issue to another person. It’s like when you were a baby; all you could do to effectively have your needs met was cry because you didn’t have the ability to use language yet. (I personally think that this is why I’ve cried as much as I have: I have trouble being able to speak how I feel or what I want to other people, and my biological default is tears). If you can’t get a grasp on how you’re feeling, you can’t express the feeling to others, which is isolating. But in turn, if you don’t have sufficient words to explain your experience, can you really figure out exactly what it is you’re feeling? There is a linguistic theory that is related to this dilemma, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Although it’s mostly disregarded today by linguists and their kin, linguistic relativism is sort of an interesting conundrum. Benjamin Whorf (an amateur linguist for whom the second half of the theory was named after) believed that:
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.”
Obviously Whorf is flawed in his thinking; current researchers believe that language does influence thought, but in more limited ways than Whorf or his followers believed. So there are actual scientists who examine the interface between thought (or cognition) and language, and describe the degree and type of interrelatedness or influence the two have on the other. May be my concerns are not the baseless wonderings of a well-read lunatic.
And maybe it’s not even an issue of having the right words to connect to the feeling – it’s not being prepared psychologically to acknowledge the emotion. May be consciously we are so opposed or judgmental towards a concept or an idea that subconsciously we make it so that we can’t recognize it in ourselves if we begin experiencing it. May be what myself and my friend are experiencing is more psychological than it is purely emotional; I wish I knew.
As productive as it feels to ruminate on issues of linguistics and psychology, the bottom line is I don’t have many more answers than I did before I began this diatribe. All I know is, in order to give aid, you have to first identify the problem. But how can you identify a problem if you don’t have the proper tools to describe the wound? Can you? How does one find the “words” if it’s not a linguistic problem, but a psychological one?
Someone qualified needs to write a book on the subject, ASAP. I wish I could commission such a thing...
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