The Poverty of Speech
While learning the Greek language, I was surprised that in the small village where I lived, when I asked for the correct word to describe something new, I was told an old word which I already knew. If I asked how a hosepipe became detached from a faucet, I would be told that it left the outlet. The word "leave" has the same meaning it does in English, so using it here was not a good description. The word used for outlet was the same as an electrical wall receptacle. It was like saying that the hosepipe walked away from the plug. Context is everything, otherwise the explanation could mean anything. This use of simple words is not because the Greek language isn’t as rich as other languages, but because in a village where people only need to converse with their small circle, the same words are recycled to take on multiple meanings. There are complicated, precise terms in any language, but most people have no need of them as they are too difficult to remember, and people think that their neighbours wouldn’t understand them, and perhaps in that they are correct. I once commented while in Italy that Italian seemed like an easy language, but was reprimanded by a German speaker, who correctly pointed out that although the language may appear simple at first blush, the more one learns, the more one realizes that correct Italian is as complicated as any other language.
Not only does a language have its idioms and dialects, which are enough to stump any learner, but it also has a plethora of words that are not heard on the street every day. Think of the English we use in daily oral communication as compared to the English in scientific or technical writing. Someone who has studied a language in school would probably have an easier time deciphering technical terms than they would have understanding a grunted, idiomatic, fractured conversation. One can always tell if a non-English speaker has learned the language from lessons or from the street, because their English is more precise, even if no one on the street understands them.
Languages always evolve, but often this is for the worse rather than the better. I see nothing wrong with invented words if they describe something more accurately. Nor is there anything wrong with the habit which has developed in the U.S. in recent years of using nouns as verbs, for example, “How does this impact our budget?” or "Mrs. Smith will chair the meeting." Words change their meanings according to usage. How else did “bad” become good? Technology also introduces new words, which are necessary to describe newly encountered entities.
English has lessened its descriptive power due to the tendency to limit vocabulary. A prime candidate for this in English is the verb “get”. We use it so much that it must be accompanied by a multitude of helper words because, by itself, it means so much or it means nothing. Try describing what “get” means to a foreigner. Get out, get busy, get by, get over, get through, get down, get back – the list is endless. All of these “get” phrases have better single words to describe the same thing, but we don’t use them. Do we prefer the poorer “get” because “get” is more common, tougher, more street, or is it that in American society, to show any sign of intelligence is considered an elitist weakness? This tendency to simplify things for whatever reason causes a language to lose words. Who nowadays uses “arise” for get up? We simply don’t have a word anymore for getting out of bed – the original word has all but disappeared.
Most people who speak only English tend to believe that English is some kind of mother language, which is the best at describing everything. English is, in fact, a great thief of words from other languages, which is one of the reasons it can be so rich. When one learns another language, however, one begins to understand that English is poor at describing many things. An example of this is the word “love”. Other languages have several words for love which describe various states. English speakers blather on about how much they love their car, their dog, or their McDonald’s hamburger, using the identical word “love” for their children or their spouse. The love for children and hamburgers is clearly not the same thing, so why then do we use the same word? Love has become such a catch-all word that, in the end, it means nothing.
The word “know” in English is another example of our laziness. Most other languages have one word for “know” in the sense of understand (Do you know how to ski?) and another word for “know” in the sense of being acquainted with. Not many people use the word “acquainted” anymore and would be thought old-fashioned for doing so, but the word “know” by itself is imprecise.
So many of our words now depend on context for meaning. That is, you can’t understand what they mean unless they are used in a phrase which explains them. This leads to many words which either mean nothing by themselves or are essentially non-words like “get”. If a language fills itself up with non-words which depend on usage for meaning, the language loses much of its beauty, precision, and power. Just as some people have a habit of overusing expletives in conversation, the power of a word is diminished when it is used as a filler, and it lends nothing to the meaning of a particular subject. If we use the “F” word as our only adjective, the shock value disappears.
Years ago, when I emerged from the cinema after seeing “Quest for Fire,” which was scripted with inflected grunts instead of words, I realized that our everyday conversations have not changed much in 10,000 years as I listened to comments about the film, which consisted of, “Yeah, mmh, huh, uuh, kinda, uhuh, y’know, like, wow!" We've become one-dimensional guttural animals who disparage nuance and learning.
