Guest Blogger: Pete Tzinksi Language

[I'm up against a couple of deadlines this week, so Pete Tzinski, writer of short stories and serial fiction, and a columnist at SF Signal, has volunteered to fill in at The Commune. I will return on Thursday. --Lori Basiewicz]

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It begins, as most things begin, with a song.

In the beginning, after all, were the words, and they came with a tune. That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world.

They were sung.

[...] songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs. -- "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman

1.

Language. It is so fundamental an element of existence, so very key a thing. It is fourth in the order of survival, in that once you have found a place to sleep, a place to eat, and a place to drink, you will then use language to convey this information to others, or to remind yourself. To study the history of languages is to study the very history of humanity, all the way back. Whether or not you believe in creationism, and a God, it is safe to say that in the beginning...there was the Word.

Once upon a time, the power of language was understood. A witch, a magician, well, they might be feared about the village, sure. They might make your hen lay funny, or make some of your teeth fall out. But even worse than someone like that was a bard. Worse than a spell, what if the Bard puts a satire on you? You will be long-dead, and people might still be laughing at you.

All of us might not know anything specific about the American War for Independence...but most of us know Yankee Doodle Dandee. Long after the events have passed and the people involved are gone, we innocently mock with a playful little children's song, originally designed to make fun of the Yanks.

That is the true power of words. They change how we see everything...and then, they hang around. They last.

It is irrelevant whether or not the Hebrew God actually exists, whether or not there was a Jesus Christ. Or it would be, if we hadn't written about it, if we hadn't told the stories. If the followers and true believers hadn't gone up and down the ancient world and told everyone, compelled everyone into believing. Without the language, without the stories, it wouldn't matter how magnificent a person Jesus had been...he would have been forgotten. Instead, we have a Bible in every hotel room.

Language remembers. Language incites. It is not just through the banging of swords and shields and screaming that the troops get their blood boiling and rush into battle. No, it's in the powerful speaking of the General, promising them victory, outraging them against their enemy, and swearing that the Gods are with them.

Language is power. Language is magic. The word "Grimoire" is just another way of saying "grammar." To cast a spell is, literally, to spell. Again, whether or not one believes in any form of mysticism is irrelevant. Through the magic power of language, in this day and age...you can make countless people, all at once, be singing the FreeCreditReport.com song. Or making horrible jokes about "gellin'." If the power to reach out across the world and plant the same piece of language, the same set of ideas, into the minds of people you will never see isn't magic, then I don't know what is.

Language. It can destroy us for the ages, and it can immortalize us. An author might die and live on, immortalized in his work. A man might die for his beliefs and live on, in the power of his language and his ideas. They are greater than statues and elegant tombs.

The ideas continue to incite and inspire and enrage.

The statues are merely admired.

2.

So why is it that this fundamental component of who we are is given so little attention and is assigned so little importance? We spend an enormous amount of time worrying about eating, sleeping, drinking, and all manner of other basic pieces of survival, and yet we neglect language. If we treated food in a similar casual and disinterested manner, then we would surely starve to death.

How many times have you been talking to someone -- or they have been talking to you, either way -- and telling a story, describing an experience, and you get to the end and you raise your hand and go, "It was like...it was like....I just can't describe it!" And how many times is this said with frustration, at the genuine inability to describe "it." To take the images and ideas and emotions in your head and convey them to another person. I hear the frustration all the time, when someone is trying hard to tell me something and I keep misunderstanding it.

I am not the first person, nor shall I be the last, who will remark on the fact that we are living in an increasingly communication-based, language-based world culture, and yet...we are becoming less and less capable of communicating with one another. We might spend hours on our cell phones, type hundreds of thousands of words into text messages, or e-mails, or blogs, or forum threads...and yet, for all of that, we do not hone our communicative skills. They lessen. So many people do not read, and cannot speak. I am forever aware of it, when sitting in a room full of people. Someone gets up to speak, and you have to parse the meaning of what they're trying to say, out through the muddle.

Why is this?

I think it can actually be explained by a quote from an interview, conducted by Bill Moyers with legendary SF author, Dr. Isaac Asimov. And I will quote the pertinent section:

ASIMOV: [...]That's another trouble with education as we now have it. People think of education as something that they can finish. And what's more, when they finish, it's a rite of passage. You're finished with school. You're no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that's kid's stuff. Now you're an adult, you don't do that sort of thing any more.

MOYERS: And in fact, like prison, the reward of school is getting out. Kids say, "When are you getting out?"

ASIMOV: Every kid knows the only reason he's in school is because he's a kid and little and weak, and if he manages to get out early, if he drops out, why he's just a premature man.

MOYERS: I've talked to some of these dropouts, and they think they've become men because they're out of school.

ASIMOV: You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there's no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don't stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. They don't stop playing tennis just because they've turned forty. They don't stop with sex just because they've turned forty. They keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing. The trouble with learning is that most people don't enjoy it because of the circumstances. Make it possible for them to enjoy learning, and they'll keep it up.

Here, then, is the reason why. The actual, conscious absorption and improvement of language is so strongly associated with schooling, which as Moyers aptly points out, is practically associated with prison. When do you get out? When do you get to quit reading these damn stories, writing these damn essays, using this damn brain, and so forth?

Language, and the things we use to improve it, are tied into that and thus seen as something not to waste time on. There are more important things to worry about, such as your job, your bills, your lower back pain. Language is down there, somewhere, as the sort of thing you'll fix up when you've retired and you get to read books on a beach. Or something. Or whatever.
Why is language important, then?

3.

If you are not willing to think for yourself, then you're a tool. And if you're a tool, you're gonna be somebody's tool. If you're a tool, then I'm gonna use you. -- Harlan Ellison

Language is important, because without being able to communicate with those around us, we are also unable to communicate with ourselves. How can we know what we think, if we cannot dismantle it and consider it from new angles, poke and prod and consider? And how can we do any of those things without the mental tools at our disposal? Those mental tools all come from language.

To study language -- and I do not necessarily mean an etymological study of words themselves, or doing the thing of learning one new word every time you go to the bathroom, or anything like that -- is to build ourselves up in many, many ways. If we want, we take in language from stories and poems, song lyrics, people talking to us in a million different ways on different topics, movies, news, and so forth. We absorb it, we learn to think about it critically, we hold it up against what we already know, and through the power of language (which is, in so many ways, also the power to discern), we are able to come out without confusion.

I have been vicariously reading books since the first moment I figured out how. All my life. I devour them. But I do it for pleasure alone, and for the sheer unabated joy which I take from a well-turned sentence, a brilliant idea delivered in a fashion that is inescapable. An image that is painted with words so perfectly, you can feel it living in your mind. I wasn't doing this to improve myself, it was just the thing that I enjoyed.

Recently, I returned to college. And what astonished me, as I worked my way through my first two semesters...was that subjects which were completely foreign to me, were made so much easier and so much less foreign simply because of the indiscriminate reading which has filled up the nooks and crannies of my life. It was from this foundation of language and story and idea that I could move forth and deal with college, and the rest of the world, and not only be able to handle it, but be able to feel comforted that it wasn't all alien to me. Even if it should have been. Language did that.

Language is wielded every day, at us. Journalists and newscasters on the networks use language to anger us, makes us feel sad, work us up over a controversy. Politicians use language to garner to them our support, to anger us into letting them lead us where they want to go (even if we would otherwise not have let them). Language lets a good liar get out of trouble, or out of a confrontation. Language can build up our self-image or completely destroy it. And it can do all of this without our conscious knowledge or consent.

As I said at the beginning, language is so powerful. It immortalizes and destroys. Sometimes, all at once.

And if we do not have at our disposal the greatest-possible amount of language and idea and story, if we do not armor ourselves and arm ourselves with language, then we can so easily have it wielded against us. As the Ellison quote says, without language, we become tools, and someone will use the tools for whatever ends they see fit, and what we think will not matter. And should we protest, we shall not have the language to evoke a reaction in anyone we protest to. We will be shouting into the abyss and waiting for the echo, in vain.

Language is a weapon against us, and a weapon for us. And it is a delight, and a pleasure. It can make us last forever. It can help us keep friends we might have lost through misunderstanding; it can help us make new friends. Language and the joy of learning are vital.

Unfortunately, the joy of learning part is stomped out of us pretty thoroughly by school. I hated school, and I find that I still do. But I adore learning. I can grumble my way through a class, and then come home and get excited because I've learned an exciting fact about the gravitational field of the Earth's moon and what the fact means. I adore learning now, and I get frustrated at how much there is for me to learn, because I can never get through it all.

These, then, must be our goals: we must equip ourselves with as much knowledge, and as much power-of-language as possible. And we must work as hard as we can to make learning a joy for those around us, and those who come after us.

Otherwise, someday, it may be that "the man who was a god amongst insects," shall simply be the fellow who forms evocative sentences, standing amidst a crowd of woefully ignorant TXT speakers.