This study
investigates and encourages the inherent playfulness of language.
By examining several case studies where the written word has
gone astray, I intend this tongue-in-cheek discussion of errors
to be both a fun exposition about language and a way to enjoy
learning about effectiveness in communication.
As children
we think a single word can change forever how blossoms fall,
or at least that's what the poem told us. Later, we learn
to depend on collections of words. We hope that their jostling
Brownian randomness will somehow, eventually, encourage them
to settle into a coherent meaning. Once we understand syntax,
that words can form coherent structures, we know that more
important is the order of their appearance if we want the
heavy lifting we are demanding of them to be performed. For
many, the final stop on this uneven path is a fascination
with the forms, rigidly demanding the exact placement of the
slotted word.
Once the
forms stretch, we realize that the endlessly plastic word
can be twisted to suit nearly any shape. Deforming structure
around it as if it were somehow unreal, the word is an arbitrary
utterance cast adrift from intention and desire. By that point
some are ready to abandon words entirely, and focus instead
on what is known, the reliable physicality of the unworded
phenomenological world, an image in a mirror, or going even
further back, the glorious chaos that was the wordless real
of their youth.
Only after
many years do we realize that we still rely on the single
word, that we ask it to carry the burden of inevitable incoherence,
collecting resonance as it tumbles across the page and time,
squirming for space, a piglet at a teat, shouldering aside
others in an urgent, interminable, demand for meaning.