Language

Two people meet in a doorway. “So good to see you,” one says, and means it, or believes she does. Her shoulders, meanwhile, stay angled toward the hall she came from, and her weight never quite leaves the back foot. The other answers warmly, the conversation lasts four minutes, and both walk away with a conclusion neither could quote. Nothing false was said. Something was communicated anyway. We talk about communication as if it were one activity called language. It is at least three. The body speaks in posture, rhythm, distance, and gaze. The voice speaks in sound and sequence. The hand speaks in marks that survive the speaker’s absence. The three overlap, translate badly into one another, and disagree most often when the message matters most. …

The English word “BS” has become one of the most successful insults in the language. It is not merely a synonym for falsehood. It is a way of refusing the dirty weight of a more vulgar word while still naming the same condition. In Spanish, mierda carries the smell of the body and the street. In French, merde carries the bluntness of matter and the ugly dignity of the real. English gives us BS, crisp, abstract, almost courteous. It is a very elegant way of saying that something is full of air. …

Send a text that says “fine” and the person on the other end will read anger. Send “fine 🙂” and they will read something closer to what was meant, though nothing about the word has changed. The little yellow face has done more grammatical work in one glyph than an adverb could manage in a sentence, which is a strange thing for a species that spent roughly five thousand years engineering its way out of pictures. …

Run a simple substitution: everywhere the word “Buddhism” appears, write “Awakeism” instead. Everywhere “Christianity” appears, write “Anointedism.” Nothing about either religion has changed — only the name, translated instead of transliterated. And yet something breaks. Awakeism sounds like a wellness retreat. Anointedism sounds like a fringe sect. The exercise costs nothing and reveals a great deal: how much of a name’s authority comes not from what it means but from the fact that it doesn’t, to English ears, mean anything at all. …

In 1940, Borges published what is not quite a story. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — collected four years later in Ficciones — begins with the discovery of a reference to a country, Uqbar, in a slightly variant edition of an encyclopedia. The country does not appear in any other edition. The country, in any verifiable sense, does not exist. This leads, in the usual Borgesian manner, to the discovery of forty volumes describing an entire planet — Tlön — whose existence is similarly unverifiable, but whose philosophers, languages, and physics are described with the patience of something that has had centuries to develop. And then Tlön begins to appear in the physical world. A compass. A metal cone. By the story’s final pages, the fictional world has begun to overwrite the actual one: scholars study Tlönian history, children are taught its geography, a generation arises for whom Tlön is more real than the country they were born in. …