Language

I am sure that someone more wise and pithy than I am has come up with a saying along the lines of "A problem is an opportunity for a solution" or "Turn lemons into lemonaide". Someone more enterprising has even probably made posters with these sayings on them. Something like:

or

(I don't know what that second one means, but I see a "hand jobs in the future" joke there somewhere...)


My point is that there is almost always a silver lining to something bad, and/or that something bad can sometimes be spun into something good.

My last blog entry was about ambiguity. It talked about how it sucks not to know what we can know and what we can't... and/or that it sucks to not understand whether it's something that should suck or not.

One area where ambiguity (lemons) has provided me lots and lots of fun (lemonaid) is language. I only speak English at any level worth mentioning (I studied Spanish for years and years, but I can barely read it at a functional level; nuanced conversation and intricacies of the language are well over my head, and I can barely remember any of the Japanese I took oh, so long ago) but even given this limitation I have learned to love the lack of clarity that exists there.

Obviously, I want to have clarity sometimes. Maybe even most of the time. If I want to bake a cake, I don't want to have the directions to be "Cook the cake for a while". I will need to know that I need to preheat the oven, the temperature, and the length of time that it should be in there.

In the absence of purely functional needs, though, ambiguities can be quite entertaining. I love puns and other plays on words. ("I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me." ... how can someone not appreciate that?)

While I think my vocabulary is pretty good (in English, at least) I still find myself glossing over what words really mean. I remember words and phrases at a molecular level, if you will, rather than at an atomic one. I remember phrases and context but not always what the words themselves mean and can mean. (Like I might remember what what is, but not oxygen and hydrogen.)

By examining words at that atomic level (or even sub-atomic, if one wants to get into etymology) is great fun. Homophones and homonyms and homographs, oh, my!

I'd be her beau if she'd bow after I made her a bow from a bough and put a red bow on it.

Language is a beautiful thing.

In addition to the words that exist, it amazes me to think of the words that do not exist (at least in English). Agnostic and altruism are words that are fewer than 200 years old, even though the concepts far predated the creation of them. English lacks the hundreds of words for snow that the Sami (not the Eskimos, for the record) have. Thinking about the words that English does not possess--especially for one who does not speak any other languages well--is daunting. I just do not know what I do not know.

I am not a massive appreciator of art. I think that, quite often, "art" is just a word applied to otherwise useless stuff that people make and/or consume. I know that I am a bit of a philistine, though, and I appreciate some of that "useless stuff", so... I don't know where that gets me.


Poets seem, to me, capable of filling gaps in language. They take words that we know (or at least words that exist) and stretch them and make us look at them in different ways so that we feel differently about those words than we did before they were used by the poet.

That, in my opinion, is art worth appreciating.

Recently I have been thinking about the phrase, "I am sorry". It's not an uncommon phrase, for sure, and one that polite children had drilled into our heads at a young age. It's a phrase that too many of us use too frequently even as too many of us use it too infrequently.

Maybe it's just me, but I hadn't really thought about what it means. Or what it can mean.

"I am sorry" is, essentially, the same as "I apologize". When one does something wrong, it is polite to apologize. To acknowledge to the wronged party that it was something that should not have been done.

"I am sorry" also can speak less to the act than the effect:

"I am sorry [that you are unhappy]."
"I am sorry [that I hurt you]."
"I am sorry [that you feel that way]."

It doesn't offer an apology--it doesn't necessarily even claim any culpability.

A third, I think less common, meaning for "I am sorry" is "I regret". Even "I regret" can mean "I apologize"... but I mean it in a different way. I mean it in the "I don't like how this turned out for me" kind of way:

"I am sorry [that I didn't buy gold at $300/oz]."
"I am sorry [that I didn't get that mole checked out]."
"I am sorry [that I ever talked to that chick]."

The ambiguity of language can defeat the purpose of using it. Even a simple phrase like "I am sorry" can carry so much nuance and meaning (that is capable of being interdependent or independent) that it gets to the point where I despair to ever being able to truly communicate anything. (And, given my difficulty on deciding on what I want to communicate, it's particularly frustrating to not be able to do so when I actually get there...)

I am not a poet, but I will have to do my best to make "I am sorry" mean what I want it to.