The Writer’s Attic
Issue Eleven
The Irrelevance of Language

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,/”To talk of many things:/Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— /of cabbages—and kings—/and why the sea is boiling hot—/and whether pigs have wings.”
- Lewis Carroll

Specifically, the time has come to talk of the most basic element of writing—words. Many different purposes, for just as many different people. Let’s take a look at words this month, and try to figure out just why they’re so important to us.

Note: I have had no further information on whether the column upload is fixed since my last update . . . so I apologize in advance for anything weird in this issue. I’ll try to get it all sorted out within the week.

Disclaimer: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Any advice/opinions in this column come straight from my own experience which is not all-encompassing and may not necessarily apply to you. I do not guarantee success with my methods. Everyone's different, and everyone has their own writing styles, which may or may not apply only to them. With that in mind, I hope something I say is of use to you, and that you enjoy reading my column.

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Quote of the Month:

“We all live in our fantasy and only endure our reality.”
R.A. Wilson

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Book of the Month:

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There , by Lewis Carroll

I can definitely see this turning into a Lewis Carroll issue . . . despite the fact that the guy was a pedophile, he sure knew his words . . . take a look at the poem Jabberwocky, and the whole incredible conversation Alice and Humpty-Dumpty have surrounding it. I quote:
“When I use a word,” Humpty-Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty-Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
It goes on, but that’s the most memorable part. I know most of you have read this one, so I won’t summarize it. If you haven’t, I don’t care how old you are, this is something you absolutely must go out and read. In fact, you should probably go out and buy it.

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The Writer’s Workbench:

Words:

To my mind, the most important question about words is simply why? Everyone has their own answers to that question, personal and impersonal, and of course there is never one right answer. In this issue and the last one, hopefully you have seen what some of those ideas mean to other writers and what they can mean to you.

The following is an essay I wrote for my application to the University of Chicago. I’m putting it here because I believe it’s relevant to the topic. You’ll find it’s a little different from my normal style—I tend to write my columns rather informally, but I hope that doesn’t make it any less interesting. Without further ado—Wordpower:

Of all the strange and ingenious things humans have invented, I believe language to be one of the most wonderful. It goes to the root of what we call humanity. We set ourselves apart from all other animals because of our ability to speak. Yet is this not in itself a weakness? By relying on language, are we not admitting that we need more than other animals to survive? Why is it so? Why must humans communicate? What in our nature drives us mad if we cannot?
All animals communicate—our scientists are clear on that fact. But why do we choose language for this? No one seems altogether keen on words. Perhaps they are merely inadequate—we know, certainly, that some extremities of emotion are too much for speech—but, quite simply, words appear to have gone out of fashion. Gone are the days of Shakespeare, when a wordsmith was held in the highest esteem. High school students groan at the mere mention of an essay, and if you tell anyone that you write—actually write on your own without being forced to by the scary English teacher in the room next door, you will be regarded as severely masochistic, if not altogether insane. The average person does not use words effectively, is most likely unable to use them correctly, and, frankly, could not care less. For the most part, the art of language is ignored—it is simply a tool for getting things done.
When you come to think of it, this last is not altogether logical. Of all the ways we have for communicating our needs, language is the least likely to achieve anything.
Babies get on marvelously, crying and laughing by turns to let their parents know when to feed them, change them, and hug them. Irate citizens write letters to their senators and representatives, but are ignored until they turn out in droves in the streets. Nations throw terms like “peace talks” and “diplomacy” back and forth, but they achieve a much clearer effect by stockpiling nuclear weapons and flexing the proverbial muscle at each other. We are taught from childhood that actions speak louder than words. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words aren’t worth a quarrel.
Which leads us back to the original question: why words? When there are so many ways we can communicate, why select one we find both trying and ineffective? Language does not inspire wonder anymore—instead we seek to abolish the amazing diversity of speech by establishing a universal language. We developed words, perhaps, to develop ourselves, as a tool to allow us to cooperate and evolve. But in this day and age, they have become irrelevant.
And maybe that’s the whole point. We need words because we need irrelevance. We need books, with the happy endings and morals they offer, because these things are so rarely found in life. We need people to cry over who are not real and people to exult with who do not exist, because life does not provide us with enough opportunities for such passing grief and joy. Words take us away from the trial that is life. Although you may not find it listed in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we need beauty and wonder just as we need food and love and sleep. Words and language are the means by which we can conjure such images. Weak though they may be, ineffectual though they undoubtedly are, words are the only means we have to express the torrents that are human emotions—to express our very sentience. We are tortured by the knowledge of a world so vast, so complex, that we cannot hope to see it all—we thirst for experience beyond our own limited understanding, and we use language to share with others and to learn from them what we cannot know ourselves. We use words to escape the isolation of being human. They are beautiful, they are vital, and we need them to satisfy our souls.

And to supplement that:
If you’re reading this, chances are you write. Maybe you want to be a published writer someday. You write because you’re good at it, you like it . . . because it’s fun. You’ve been telling me why. So here it is, in return: why I like to write.

As you (hopefully) have seen in the above essay, I believe that humans write because they need language to survive. We need a grasp of experience beyond our own limited understanding of the world around us. We use language and writing as a means to see the world. We wish to share our thoughts with others because we wish them to know and understand us, to recognize why we, each of us individually, are the way we are. We wish to justify our existence, to create something that says to the world “Look! I had this thought. Not you, not anyone else, but I, and I alone, and therefore you, world, need me.” We write, alse, to escape from the prison of flesh and reach a higher, perhaps unattainable, level of consciousness—we, or I at least, write to discover what I am, and what I am doing here.
So . . . I write because I am afraid to talk. I am afraid to say what is in my head, what I think, how I feel, because I am afraid of being ridiculed—or worse, perhaps, misunderstood. I write to connect myself to others . . . and to escape from the common plane. I write to create a place for my mind to go, to try and understand, to explain to myself those things in my life which I cannot rightly comprehend . . . I write both to run away and to bring myself home. I write . . . because like all people, I need something uniquely my own.

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The Glossary:

Yes, I know it’s silly. But I thought it would be fun to see:

Word: A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes.

Morpheme : A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts.

Phoneme: The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English.

Language:
1. Any means of conveying or communicating ideas; specifically, human speech; the expression of ideas by the voice; sounds, expressive of thought, articulated by the organs of the throat and mouth. (Note: Language consists in the oral utterance of sounds which usage has made the representatives of ideas. When two or more persons customarily annex the same sounds to the same ideas, the expression of these sounds by one person communicates his ideas to another. This is the primary sense of language, the use of which is to communicate the thoughts of one person to another through the organs of hearing. Articulate sounds are represented to the eye by letters, marks, or characters, which form words.)
2. The expression of ideas by writing, or any other instrumentality.
3. The forms of speech, or the methods of expressing ideas, peculiar to a particular nation.
4. The characteristic mode of arranging words, peculiar to an individual speaker or writer; manner of expression; style.

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Insomniacs Central:

Featured below are a few more responses to the last challenge:

From: Witchmaster
I could be boring and say that the purpose of language is to communicate, I write because I can, and the actual words mean little more than a way to express an idea, but I wouldn’t exactly be speaking the truth. Yes, language came to be a way of communication, but we can communicate with our body language and expressions too, can’t we? So it’s a more than that. It’s a way to express ourselves without any limitation, a way to put feelings into words. It allows us to get ideas across to anyone anywhere anytime in the world. And to me, the words used to express ideas are gold. There is hardly anything more valuable than the words we use, whether we’re using them simply to talk to our friends or putting them in stories to unlock worlds otherwise hidden from us. I write because I love it. I write because it’s a way for me to indirectly express how I’m feeling. It allows me to get away from the world I live in and go to another where what happens is (mostly) what I want to happen, though I’m always discovering new things. I write because it’s one of the most powerful ways to express myself.

From: Captain Scarlet Penguin Keeper
You ask why do we write. This is a tough question. It is hard to answer. Our souls are like abstract art, you don't show them to everyone, because they might not understand, and that misunderstanding can be very painful. But you asked nicely, so I will answer in like kind. I write so that I can have what I cannot. I have no romantic offers, a pair of complete opposites share a stormy but true love. I have a lasting sadness, a young girl gets over a terrifying event from her past to be happier.
Also, we write to understand, to get what we don't get. We use our stories to develop theories about life, about how the great game of existence is played. We create characters that believe these theories, then we hope that people will read it and believe our theories too. I'm not saying it isn't a little selfish, but it's true. But I think the final reason, the essence, is not to be alone. If we can create people at will, are we ever truly alone.

Before I give you the next challenge, I have a little confession to make. When I started writing this column, I was all about fantasy—it was all I wrote. Then I expanded my reading horizons . . . and for approximately a year now, I have wanted to write something much more realistic. However, I planned my topic outlines a long, long time ago (like the song) . . . and since I am trying to stick to them . . . next month’s topic is scheduled to be about the use of magic. I might play with that a little and deal with magic realism . . . but the challenge, to fit in with next issue, is as follows:If you could have one spell, in your entire life, work for you . . . what would it be? How would you do it? Why that particular spell? Be creative . . . truth is secondary to beauty, at least on the imaginary plane . . .

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The Microphone:

From: DennisP1 )
I found your page fascinating and will be back again to be motivated by your words.
A question I have though, after reading your section on apostrophes, an area, besides spelling, that I've often run into difficulties with. In writing poetry for example, in order to reduce syllables in a particular line, I may, like in "She has" or “that is” use an apostrophe s to represent has or is. Like in, "She's been around a long time." Or That’s what I’m talking about.” My question is; Is this acceptable in business and more formal writing as well?
In response to your questions from your Social Commentary dialog. “how is it that we do not accept socialism as good?"
Many people equate socialism to Nazism, despite the distinct difference; one's goal is equality and the other, racial purity. We are confronted constantly with visions of skinheads wearing swastikas representing Nazism and the visions of hippy communes from the 60's and 70's as failed experiments in American Socialism.
It's no wonder we back away from giving them any further serious thought.
Yet in my own opinion Socialism is destined to fail. Why, you may well ask, because it does not balance with the psychology of man.
Throughout our lives we are confronted with the givers and takers, it's a psychological reality. What one builds another destroys, what one may create for the good of man another will use for evil, therefore, government. Though government, since it is made up of man is plagued with the same problems.
The answer does not lie with government, the educational system or with a particular life style or religion. Rather, it lies within the mind of man and their inability to perceive correctly the dynamics of life, their position in it and the long term results, of their actions or inactions on and within it. .
What do you think?
Den

In response to your first question: there’s no absolute answer. It used not to be acceptable to use contractions in formal and/or business writing, but . . . we’re in the age of email and speedy, wireless connections . . . and no one is going to think less of you for using contractions. It really depends on how pedantic you want to be—listen to Data (from Star Trek) talk sometime. I believe he was intended never to use any contractions, although the writers did make the occasional error. The rule I generally go by is this: if it’s a job/internship application, most likely going out by snail mail, I try to be as formal as possible. If it’s something that I can send through email—i.e. a letter of enquiry (which, incidentally, can be spelled with an ‘i’ or with an ‘e’), then I use contractions. To be honest, I wouldn’t think anyone would fault you for using contractions in either case—I would be far more concerned about things such as spelling and grammatical errors, because those would indicate either that you didn’t care enough to check it . . . or that you just didn’t know. So . . . contractions are up to you.
I’m not certain I understand your second question . . . but what you seem to me to be saying is that man is neither fundamentally good nor fundamentally evil. I would agree with that.
I’m not sure I agree with the sentiment that socialism is doomed to failure, however. I would argue that’s it’s not a question of one man necessarily thwarting another—it’s a question of man choosing how he wants to live, and what measure of control he wants over that. I don’t believe that man is ultimately incapable of making the “correct” decisions, if indeed there are correct decisions. Nor do I believe that there is only one right way to do anything, especially to live—so I’m not supporting socialism above all else.
What appeals to me about socialism is that, in theory, the need for government eventually goes away. The reason that this hasn’t worked so far is because it’s been implemented on a large scale with a system of people who are used to government. The “problem” (I don’t see it as a big problem) with socialism is that it only works if everyone wants it to. Therefore, if you started with a group of people who wanted it to work . . . and gradually expanded that group along the same guidelines, I don’t see why it need ever fail.
Sorry if I didn’t really answer your question. As I said, I wasn’t sure I understood it. Let me know.
Thanks for your comments, Den.
Autumndark

From: xHannahx )
there's one thing you didn’t get about the misuse of apostrophes (although this might be something found only in the UK)
this is what my mother refers to as “the grocers’ apostrophe” this is the phenomenon of prices pertaining to a plural inanimate object. for instance: cabbage’s £0.70 per kilo.
it might be said that i am obsessed with correct use of punctuation (tho i still can’t get colons and semi-colons), but it’s something that winds me up. ah dear.

I’ve never heard of this before, so please feel free to correct me if what I am about to say—type—is completely incorrect.
The grocers’ apostrophe, as you say . . . seems to me to be a grammatical error. At least, using your example—
“Cabbage’s – 0.70 per kilo”
. . . the price per kilo doesn’t belong to either the single cabbage or the many cabbages. You’re exactly right—cabbage’s refers (or should, if it were punctuated correctly) to an inanimate plural object, and so should be cabbages . . . simply a plural noun.
Anyone who puts an apostrophe near something like that is no grammarian, just plain confused.
Or, of course . . . in possession of some knowledge which I would dearly love to have.
Thanks for your comments,
Autumndark