Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.
I'm in the process of reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which is full of intensely stunning imagery as well as numerous passages that made me almost choke with laughter, but this particular quote has stuck with me for the last few days. Sometimes I feel like Root, and sometimes I just feel like talking about words. So I'm going to sit down and have a good long wank. That's right, this rant is about words – none in particular, just the whole language thing in general. Consider yourself warned.
When examined clinically, it's painfully obvious to any concerned observer that the English language is grossly inefficient at its most basic manifest function: namely, the transfer of information. As the level of complexity of any language increases, the rate of actual informational unit transferred per character decreases at a rate proportional or greater to aforementioned complexity, and English is one of the most god-awfully complex languages there is.
Computers use binary code – simple, efficient, logical, mechanical. The rules are simple and easily defined, and there are no exceptions. Ever. The switch is either on or it's off; there is either an electron travelling through the circuit, or there isn't. There could be an argument made that the hypothetical quantum computer, relying on probability instead of concrete certainty for circuitry, would be the first step toward artificial intelligence, because “thoughts” per se would be completely superfluous in an environment of pure logic.
What is frustration? Or what is anger? Or love? When I say love, the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, through their memories of love, or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand, because words are inert, they're just symbols, they're dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable. And yet, you know when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we've connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for.
“Waking Life”, an absolutely fantastically unreal movie by Richard Linklater
Humans, of course, are notoriously illogical, and as a result we've developed over the millennia countless systems for communicating to each other and ourselves, none of which even remotely resemble binary. Binary is easy to use, transmit, and above all, store; this number, this character, this datum can be placed once and used a nearly infinite amount of times, or used once and discarded just as easily; all is just a series of 1s and 0s. People don't work that way. Our minds store sights and sounds, smells and emotions – all tangled up, intertwined and inter-associated, never perfectly remembered, in fact mostly forgotten even as they happen. How do you reduce a thought, a feeling, an experience to a series of 1s and 0s, a shot of data from your mind to another's? This is the purpose of language: to reduce all the wonderful and terrible extremes of human existence to a form that can be outputted, transferred, received, and translated by another, different but similar, system.
Words are the pitiful attempt to create a bridge between minds, to share our thoughts, our experiences, our emotions, the very things that make us human; every worthwhile conversation is a re-affirmation of humanity, and a renewal of the connection to all the other thinking, feeling people of the world.
With your words, your description, you try to refine your audience's subjectively associative translation; you want them to know, to feel what it was like to be there, to see it, to talk to him. It matters if the salt spray on the breakers tickled or irritated or stung, whether the brilliant fire of the sunset was spilled honey across the delicately swirling clouds, or withdrew over the horizon like a jungle village reduced to embers. This is why English has so many redundancies, exceptions, and open-ended grammatical structures – the basic difference between us and machines, the reason that Orwellian Newspeak is a concept any linguaphile finds so utterly terrifying. Language is so bulky, versatile and free-form because it is a crude and inefficient tool that is still struggling to evolve into a means to say much more than “Food here!” or “Sabre-toothed tiger behind you!”. It is trying to capture the essence of a fraction of a facet of one soul, what it's like to be this person, seeing this, thinking that; sharing the experience, spreading the echo of the moment, of the emotion, of life.
A computer doesn't care if the sky is cyan, or aquamarine, or rich dark velvet strewn with diamonds; it notes the RGB value, stores it in the appropriate memory, and moves on. It stores the average granular measurement of the sand, the wavelength and angle (theta) of the light from the planet's star, the exact temperature and content of the ocean spray, and can reproduce it perfectly, every time it is called to do so – but two people looking at the same picture, living in the same scene, will have totally different experiences with it. There is no connection, no significance, no humanity exchanged.
Know your language. Love your language. Understand it, play with it, appreciate it in all its crazy idiosyncrasies. Language is data trying to become poetry. The first is more useful, the second is human.
Published 2004-02-19
This edition published 2005-08-27
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