words, words, words

How many trillions upon trillions upon gazillions of words have I heard in my lifetime? It must be equal to the number of stars in the Milky Way, and maybe more. My first thought is, no wonder I speak this language, the English language. How could I possibly help it, with the sheer number of words have been thrown at me again and again and again?

I picked up a pencil to doodle on some paper, and words came out onto the paper, filling it in a very short time. Words, random words, and phrases I've heard that I'll never forget. Simple things, but the sort of combinations of words that always stick in our minds, like "Two plus two equals four." Movie quotes: of the millions of them stored in my brain, fifteen or twenty poured out from the pencil almost without my knowledge or permission.

"My clumsy hand!"

"Clumsy me!"

"...odds and ends to buy..."

"Just charge everything to good old Mitch. He's loaded."

"Katie Scarlett O'Hara!"

"He's got his tiger."

"What goes on in that pea-brain of yours?"

"I've been turned into a cow. Can I go home?"

"Why anyone would wanna be an orphan is beyond me!"

And then, from a note I saw today in my aunt's kitchen, written by my cousin to her mother:

"Take some to work. Tomatoes, rice, potatoes, salt. Yummy and fresh!"

Writing is one thing, and that happens to have stayed with me and come out with the rest, in pencil, but it really is the spoken word that dominates our lives.

Obviously, we could speak any language easily if we could hear it that much! That is rather comforting, since I aspire to learn so many. Not that I will ever be able to hear any of the languages on my list that much, but it comforts me that speaking them would be so inescapable if I could. I'd love to go on a fast from English, but it pours and pours and gushes around inside my mind. French trickles and sometimes flows, Spanish attaches itself, unbidden, to everything, but German has not quite found enough room.

On n'habite pas dans une paye, on habite dans une lange. (One does not live in a country, one lives in a language.)

This quote was somewhere in my very first French textbook. How incredibly true. Language changes the objects around you. When you first start learning a new language, a bad (but normal) habit is to translate each word in your head to what you know it means in English, instead of letting the new word become it's own symbol of it's meaning, if that makes sense. How different the world becomes when, instead of thinking "Tisch means table," you look at a table and SEE ein Tisch. Different to see das Fenster and not the window, after all. And these are only objects that we use to live our lives. What about life itself, it's complexities and feelings and flow? All tongues have humanity in common, but if everything is represented by different words than you're used to, there really is some slight difference in your reality. Some people would say words are words, that a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. That's quite a compliment to the rose I guess, but by any other name it would not be a rose!

It's something to think about.