The Fault in Our Languages

It was a pleasant surprise to find out that we were to watch a CrashCourse video featuring John Green as a warm up in Literature class. Pleasant because John Green and Hank Green are part of the 1% of the internet that is not cats, business or sexually explicit material, but actual, interesting content.

The video was about how and why we read literature. Green says that literature's purpose is for communication, for communicating to people near and far, both now and forever. He states that the purpose of literature is to be able to communicate with someone who may be very different from us, who may not even speak the same language, and who may or may not even be born yet. He then goes on to talk about how we use figurative language; similes, metaphors, hyperbole and all the other things you learn in English class in 10th grade, to communicate more effectively. He also talks about how using cliched or obvious figurative language can actually be a hindrance to communication.

All this made me think about why we need figurative language in the first place. After all, one of the biggest gripes that people hold against figurative language is "Why can't the author just say what they mean?" Figurative language can be seen as roundabout and unnecessary, and it may seem that the author could be more clear about what they are trying to say about life and the world around us if they would simply write that down instead of making a reader go on a scavenger hunt.

But figurative language isn't unnecessary. Quite the contrary, it is an essential, and might I say fundamental part of communication as a whole. Humans would not be able to communicate without a lot of figurative language. And that's because of the inherent limitations of language. Any language; be it English, Spanish, Esperanto, Klingon, or something that J.R.R Tolkien came up with and wrote a book about, is and will always be unsatisfactory when it comes to actually being able to express ourselves. The reason for that is that we don't think in language. Computers think in language (languages like C++, Java, BASIC or Python), but humans aren't computers. We think in an abstract mass of emotions and memories. Transcribing that to a language is secondary.

Furthermore, there comes a point where language becomes incapable of expressing the definition of things outright. My favorite example is the color red. The only true way to define red is the wavelength of visible light that is red, but that fails to capture how we experience red, the emotions we feel and what we think of and what we associate with red. But this extends to emotions as well, how do we define happy? Sad? Anger? Envy? There is no one way to define these things, so we can't truly talk about emotion with language alone, and if we can't talk about emotion with language alone, we can't truly capture the essence of a thought in language. Simply put, language by itself; letters, words, clauses, sentences, are mere shadows of what we think.

This is where figurative language comes in. We need figurative language to actually be able to convey these thoughts, or get as close to actually conveying them as we can. Figurative language goes beyond language by itself, and through figurative language we don't just hear what the author thinks, we can understand it. Figurative language resembles that abstract mass of our thoughts because like our thoughts, it too is abstract. When we try to understand figurative language, we grasp at ethereal gossamer threads, fragile and almost incorporeal. Figurative language compares the world we know and perceive to the world the author is trying to show us, and because of that, it not only shows us a topic, but it goes beyond language and expresses thoughts as emotions and memories as well. So while figurative language makes literature mindlessly difficult at times, without it, literature is entirely meaningless.

For example, would the message of Crime and Punishment be anywhere near as effectively communicated if we had not experienced Raskolnikov's guilt over his actions and his need for redemption? Would it have been more effective for F.Scott Fitzgerald to simply talk about how humans struggle against time and society and inequality of opportunity, instead of telling the tale of Gatsby, who longs to repeat the past with his advantages from the present?

We need figurative language to bypass a barrier that comes with the inadequacy of language. I mentioned computer languages earlier, and computers do think in languages. We can write code in languages like Java, C++, Python, or what ever strikes your fancy, and any computer will be able to process and understand it. And yet humans cannot do this, we cannot feed a human a sentence in the English language and expect them to understand it the same way another person does.

The reason computers think in languages is because they all think the same. There is no ambiguity between computers, no complicated emotions to convey, nor thoughts that transcend form as humans do. Computers perceive logically and uniformly. Humans are not nearly that simple. We all perceive the world in different ways, we all think in different ways, and ultimately language alone cannot communicate to people of infinitely many worlds, infinitely many backgrounds and infinitely many ways of thinking. Figurative language is the language of thoughts, and using figurative language we can come to understand the thoughts of another person, whether they be near or far, family or strangers, alive or dead.