Mind Your Words

Mind Your Words

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Words are everywhere. They flow off our fingertips onto sheets of paper. They roll off our tongues and buzz about us when we speak. They float about our heads even in the stillest of silences and darkest of nights, and sometimes (and indeed quite often) even when we sleep. We are surrounded by words and language all the time, because language is inescapable. And yet we pay words, which are what make us human, so little attention.

 

If you have ever questioned your vocabulary, this piece will give you a word of encouragement by scrutinising words a little more closely. All of us are fully capable of sculpting the little symbols of our spoken language into the meaningful units we call sentences. 

 

But what are words? Surely they are more than just clumps of letters crawling across a screen. The Online Cambridge Dictionary defines a word as ‘a single unit of language that has meaning and can be spoken or written’, but this definition hardly helps us appreciate how adept we really are at acquiring languages. A word indeed is a single unit, but every word is a laundry list, a bundle of all sorts of information we store in our memory. 

 

Again, we turn to the dictionary — this time not for a definition, but to see how a dictionary records these little building blocks of our language. Any good dictionary will tell us these few things about a word: its spelling, its pronunciation (recorded as those alien-looking symbols like ‘ə’ and ‘θ’), its interactions with other words (with example sentences like “They are afraid of dogs” and their category labels like noun and verb), and, of course, its meanings.

 

Each of these facets of a word is a marvel of the mind, each in so many ways that this article will have no room to explore all of them.

 

We can start our odyssey with what is perhaps the most essential part of the word — what it contains, its meaning. But words are insufferably capricious, arbitrary things. Each has meanings of its own that we speakers have no inherent reason to be assigning them. What do I mean when I slander words in this way? The word frog itself does not bear any physical resemblance to the smooth, slimy, jumping amphibians it describes. The word happy does not even remotely have the physiological effect of evoking in us feelings of happiness, nor sad feelings of sadness. This arbitrariness means that there are no mnemonic shortcuts to learning words, and yet it has not stopped us from learning over our years of existence that each word is tied with a specific set of meanings, one word at a time. We are awfully good at connecting the dots between word and meaning.

 

But this task of equating word with meaning is not as simple as it seems. The information about meaning our minds supply us when we call upon them is incredibly intricate, yet most of it is inaccessible to consciousness. We know that a mug is not nearly the same thing as a cup, a bee is surely not the same thing as a wasp, and weather is not quite climate, even if we can’t always precisely articulate in words how exactly they are different because they are just so similar. No matter how intricate or amorphous the meaning of a word might be, our brains obligingly keep record of the twenty-to-forty thousand odd words we know.

 

But this act of memorisation encompasses so much more than meaning — we only started with meaning because it is the most apparent part of a word. But there is so much more going on when we learn a word, because although all words are equal, some words are more equal than others. For example, take a simple word like the, which is only the most commonly used word in the English language (this sentence alone already contributes to that statistic by two, no, three, uses). We all know what it means, even if in very conceptual terms. It conveys meanings of definiteness, allows us to make reference to things, and usually indicates that the thing that follows it exists, either in reality or in an imaginary universe. The plague. The Hunger Games. The Queen of England. 

 

But just because we know that the has the meaning of "definiteness" doesn't mean we can dispense away with it by supplanting it with some other alternative, can we? This means that words have some other property besides their meaning that defines how we use them, and that is exactly what I mean by a deeper layer than meaning. It determines how a word interacts with other words in sentences, and through it, we can sort all words into these familiar categories: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, determiner….

 

When we learn a word, we are subconsciously sorting words into distinct categories like these that help us understand how they might be used when we construct sentences of our own. The members in a particular word class typically function in similar ways. You might have heard in very general terms that nouns are persons, places, and “things”, concrete and abstract. The things nouns refer to are therefore often performing the actions described by verbs, which are often called action words. Most sentences begin with a noun phrase, called the subject, and go on to include a verb telling us what exactly was done. The dog barked all night. The cat pushed the glass off the table. The politician made a fool of himself. Generally speaking, we have a model: noun, verb, thing affected by verb action. Of course, these generalisations are riddled with exceptions, but a good — an infinite — number of sentences can be created despite them. 

 

And because we know this machinery of a typical sentence as well as the expected behaviour of its components, we can construct grammatical sentences with mechanical precision, even if we don’t fully understand what the components mean — as long as we know the “grammar” of a particular word, we can quite accurately figure out where it might fit in a sentence. We can even abstract precise frameworks of meaning from nonsensical sentences  — colourless green ideas sleep furiously. What sleeps? Ideas. How did they sleep? Furiously? What were they like? A colourless green. For this, we can give thanks to the expert word-sorters in our heads.

 

But even within each family of words, no two nouns or verbs are ever quite the same, even if they have similar meanings. For example, some verbs demand that a noun follow them, while others prefer not to be caught in such a bind. This explains why we can devour but not dine a pizza. It explains why we can reach but not arrive the theatre. It explains why we can applaud but not clap a performance. When we learn the grammatical information a word encodes, we not only record what broad class it belongs to, but also what specific interactions it might have with other words. That is a lot more stuff to be remembering for each word on top of its meaning, of the tens of thousands of words we know!

 

At this point, you might then be wondering how we are capable of sorting words into categories. That is because our linguistic minds are not only capacious databases and skillful sentence architects, but also expert surgeons, dissecting never-before-seen words into their constituent parts to make sense of them. The spelling of a word is often so much more than an arbitrary string of letters, but clusters of familiar sounds called morphemes. Take a close look at this never-before-uttered sentence:

 

Bileful squabblers rechurred all the beeks.

 

Even though most words here make no sense to anyone, we can see why each word fits where it fits in its sentence. The subject squabblers ends with -er, much like other nouns, teacher, computer, amplifier, which are all capable of doing things or having things be done to them. The action word rechurred in this sentence resembles verbs we already know, because it starts with re- and ends with -ed. Think reheated, rehabilitated, retried, reenacted. Definitely something a squabbler can do to a beek. Sometimes, words resemble other words we already know — bileful, which very possibly means “full of bile”, in the tradition of other descriptive words ending in -ful like wonderful, playful, awful. And when all else fails and a word’s spelling doesn’t seem to conform to any patterns we already know, we can still infer what class it belongs to based on our subconscious knowledge of the noun-verb-noun structure we discussed earlier. Therefore, a beek is quite likely a thing that can be churred (or rechurred) by a squabbler. Our minds can sift sense out of nonsense, precisely because of how sensitive we all are to the recurring patterns of the language, even to the tiny, meaningful sounds that make up a word. 

 

When you read that sentence, you inadvertently let a bunch of words strung from random clusters of sounds pass as legitimate words. Because even though they aren’t words in our dictionaries, we also recognise they could be — our inbuilt word polygraphs gave them the green light. But now, consider this set of words.

 

• Plitch

• Groal

• Thule

• Wutch

• Ptotr

• Mglia

• Sziesp

• Dnot

 

Of this list, any speaker will agree that plitch, groal, thule, and wutch aren’t English words but could be, while everything else is not and simply cannot be. Those are flat out out of the question. How do we arrive at such conclusions? Even though letters themselves are lawless fiends and can technically arrange themselves however they like, words are not, because words conform to certain rules of each language that define what words sound illegal and which do not. Our tacit knowledge of the language’s sound patterns is our bouncer against wild words that don’t pass the polygraph test, so we can keep imposters out. 

 

The humble word upon closer inspection is an astonishing complex of information and a feat of mind and memory. It gives new meaning to what it means to be a walking dictionary, because isn’t that really what we all are, as languageful beings? It would do us a world of good to give words — and ourselves, walking repositories of words — more credit. As Steven Pinker puts it, words might be a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning, but where learning is caused by complexity in the mind.