And the Colombians have 27 words for snow

Every now and then I get a mysterious Yahoo request for people I’ve never heard of, with very mysterious email addresses, to sign up for the Hen Hud Speecho-American listserver. Presumably it’s some sort of complicated spam, where they use Oral Interpretation to get money out of Nigeria. Damn, these people are clever. I just can’t keep up with them.

Things are awfully quiet, otherwise, and I won’t bore you with the details of nothing happening. I will point out, however, that today most linguists accept that language does not precede thought. There used to be an idea that, if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. (I even posited this as part of the creation of the artificial intelligence of Lingo, back in the day.) This is no longer accepted on the linguistic level: the nature of language is such that its mechanics do not determine what we can or can’t think. How well we can express what we’re thinking, of course, but not the thoughts themselves. For example, only the Germans have the word schadenfreude, but you don’t need to be born in Berlin to enjoy the misfortunes of others. By the same token, or conversely if you want to get all logicky on us, you can’t change people’s thoughts by changing their language (which is what Orwell claimed, clearly demonstrated in 1984, and I only bring this up because of the Orwellian mention on WTF, which has, thankfully, sent everyone home and lightened up on the Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah malarkey). The question could be, then, if this is true, and fairly common knowledge, what exactly is going on in the language games that politicians play, if they objectively cannot change thought through language. I think we may venture into areas of pomo with that question, where the nature of language games is very much grist for the mill. But pomo or not, the politicians make the language, and something happens. What that something is makes for great meditation fodder.

But I offer a different line of thought. Flag burning. It’s not linguistic, but it’s an analogous area, in that it's definitely a political game. Whenever the night is darkest, and all around them are losing their heads, and every program and policy is failing miserably, Congress rouses itself to propose a Constitutional amendment banning flag burning. The fact that they come as close as they do to making this happen is astounding. The thing is, everyone knows that, well, there is no flag burning. It’s just not happening. The streets are not littered with the ashes of Old Glory. It’s an issue with no instances. Worse, presumably there isn’t more than a handful of people in Congress dumb enough not to understand the First Amendment and the meaning of flag symbolism well enough to know that the former is what the latter represents, and the minute you curtail one of them you’ve curtailed both. Yet this august body is willing to spend however much time and energy would be required to propose an amendment, get it reviewed by all the state legislatures, with all the ensuing yakking and yakking and yakking, with an end result either of enormous time wasted when the country is in crisis and should have been solving problems that exist, or worse, a Constitutional amendment that limits the exercise of free speech.

Talk about language games!

Anyhow, as I said, things are awfully quiet. And if nothing is happening, there isn’t much to say. So, I ramble…