Phonemes Solo

The Railway Crossing, Fernand Léger, 1919

The Car Analogy works with almost anything. Language is a car that gets your idea from A > B. A great ride makes the journey tolerable (as great prose is effortless to read). Abusing the car will break it, as in deprecating words. Recently the reporting of News of the World's phone hacking has relied on repeating the same key words and phrases constantly. We're told that advertisers and individuals distanced themselves from 'toxic' association with the paper - I heard it so many times I felt agitated as if the word itself was so. We were also told the 'vast majority' of journalists did not employ illegal methods in gathering information. The vast majority of times I've HERD or RED 'vast majority' I've unconsciously deleted the word 'vast'.

The first time I became aware of the overuse of a word was when David Beckham injured his foot in 2002. The medical term for the part of his foot that prevented him from playing was called the 'metatarsal'. So often was it uttered that it led to column inches devoted to explaining the anatomy of the foot and I've never been able to dissociate the two since. But at least the word still has meaning. Under extreme cases a word can completely lose meaning, which is known as semantic satiation. Repeated often enough in a short space of time, a word will carry all the essence of a flapping mouth emitting the webdings font. In fact, I have a memory of early primary school in which I stumbled over HOUR byzantine English orthography. For whatever reason I wanted to write /ʤɔn/. I tried <Jhon> at first and said it over in my head while looking at the spelling. It didn't look WRITE, so I tried putting the <h> after the <o>. I must have seen John Major written in a newspaper or something, and recognised that as correct as I said 'John' a few times. Then I noticed the more I said /ʤɔn/ the more it decomposed into the constituent sequence of sounds: The voiced alveolar affricate, the open-mid back rounded vowel, and the alveolar nasal. Of course, a name has no real meaning - in most cases it's an ancient phrase that's long since been a string of sounds traditionally used to label someone. The name John is from Hebrew 'God is generous' via Greek via Latin, but good luck finding someone who deliberately chose it for its original sense. For an idea of just how much the name is only a string of sounds, LUKE at the number of variations that have been ported and undergone various sound changes in only two millennia. Perhaps a mild form of this is behind semantic shift. As over-use or extension destroys existing meaning, a subtle variation of that definition moves to take its place.

The destruction of semantics can be intentional as well as a natural part of language change. Consider 'WMD' - originally it meant 'weapon of mass destruction', but what is it now? Solely within the context of its use we determine that it is a bad thing the enemy has. In abbreviating the phrase into five syllables we are prevented from coupling the abstract with the concrete, and therefore understanding it. In the run-up to the Iraq War I didn't need a messenger from the future to tell me that particular phrase would be shortened by the end of the WEAK. It's just one of the many subversions of language wrought by state and corporate anti-communication. In empty words, meaning can be constructed later at a convenient time, and altered further with changing circumstances. A day is a long time in modern business and politics, especially when good business is judged in short-term profit and politics in who can survive scandals and slither to power. In a similarly short-sighted media, no-one KNEED ever be trapped on record advocating a stance that later becomes inconvenient. It's nothing KNEW - Orwell wrote about this in Politics and the English Language (1946). Consider his parody translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11...

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Compared to the original text, all the visual metaphors and analogies have been stripped leaving behind a highly abstract sentence that, while grammatically correct, communicates little - in this Biblical case, in the WEIGH of moral guidance. I was once accused in NationStates of saying a lot of nothing in a political manifesto. I thought about what the scientific term might BEE for this. Phrasi-lalia? Turns out there's already a word - babbling. I hope this evening's post doesn't come across as a collection of wingdings symbols.

Symbols are all around us. Purely graphic icons are called logos - somewhat ironic since that is Ancient Greek for 'word' or 'speech', but communicate words and more they indeed do. Other descendants from the Proto-Indo-European *leg include 'logic, lecture, legend, lexicon, dialogue, legal, loyal, legacy'. A lot of what one wants to be said of an entity is reduced into a visual mark. Similarly, auditory logos emerged into popular conscience with Intel's five note jingle in the nineties. Always keen to strip mine the undiscovered country, I noticed a few years ago that Philips, eBay, and T-Mobile had all created their own ear-worms. But the ultimate gimmick must have been Phones4U's pseudo-sign language.

[two-fingered gesture resembling phone] [four fingers displayed] [two-fingered gesture resembling letter 'U']

I don't know whether that ever caught on beyond Phones4U and the VO5 haircare products - you can easily imagine the gestures involved, so I needn't try and quote them here - because I stopped watching television altogether at that point five year ago. Here's an idea, how about you tell me verbally why your product is superior to competitors and why I should buy it. You can't?

Incorporating drafts August 2006 and October 2010
[1023;36]