Your Linguistic Significance Is Jacked Into My Friggin' Skull

Hey boys and girls! Today, we're going to talk about one of ALL of our favorite topics! LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY!

Please don't stop reading already; though this may sound as appealing as falling down in front of Pat Morita or having a nerve conduction study (guess what I'm doing tomorrow!) I promise this will all be worthwhile in the end if you continue with this. I promise you'll think and talk with as much wonderful clarity as I do--and who wouldn't want that? Moses Josh leans back and laughs, but I don't care; and just to show him that he doesn't scare me, I'm going to use his name as an example, even if it does cause some problems that we'll just have to ignore. Fuck him.

Okay, so here we go: we all use language, in some form or other, but although we use it with masturbatory ease there still remains the problem of understanding how it actually works, how language itself is able to communicate everything that it DOES communicate. Now, some people would stop right here, and say that any answer we could come up with would be incomplete because the answer itself must exist in linguistic form, and therefore be self-referential to a point where it invariably misses something, because it cannot see the whole at once, being PART OF THE WHOLE. These people cleary don't know how to have a good time, and we'll forget them, sweep them under the rug like so many toenail clippings and mysterious Kleenexes, and assume for now that there is a way for us to express and communicate to each other how exactly language allows us to express and communicate to each other. Rivited yet? You should be. After all, King Charles II did say, "understanding language is more fun than overdosing on heroin suppositories." And you know what? He was right.

One way to start thinking about this stuff is (Gabe, chime in here) understanding how proper names work, how we know a name means the thing it means, and all the other stuff associated with that. This is, as far as I've been led to understand, a black hole that you could dive into if you wanted to, and I can here your starving voices screaming with excitement, "Andy!, Andy!, tell us about names!" but I'm not going to really, because there's something much more important that I want to get to.

Let's face it, names are all well and good, but how are we supposed to have fun talking about NAMES? (unless of course we start talking about Vera de Vera, to whom I mailed something for my boss last week. MAN, what were HER parents thinking...? They must've been, like..."dude, what should we name her?" And the wife was all, "I don' know, les naime her Lucy or sonteen." And he said..."shit, you know what'd be fuckin' crazy? I mean like really CRAZY? Let's just fuckin' call her Vera." "Hombre, ju loco, thas a ba' idea, porque este nombre esta estupido, pendejo, el idea esta muy susio y yo no puedo comprenderlo que me lo encanta" and he jumped up and said "baby chill! Do you wanna' be like everybody else? Do you wanna' follow the lemmings off the edge of the cliff into the churning sea below? Well I don't, and I know little Vera doesn't either. So go ahead. Jump. Jump if you want to. Or....you can come with us. And walk away, and feel the sunshine on your face. Whaddaya say, honey? Huh? Whaddaya SAY???" And with a tear in her eye, she knew it was meant to be.) So let's move on to something more fun...but there's one more thing we need to understand. We talk about truth with regard to all of this, because it's very important for meaning. We know what something means, because we know whether or not it's true. But let's be clear about this: sentences are not themselves true or false. I could explain why, but trust me, you don't want me to. What ARE true or false (in other words, the things that actually themselves have a positive or negative truth value) are these things called PROPOSITIONS--basically, ideas that are expressed by sentences. THESE are what we're really understanding when we say we understand a sentence. Okay, so now for the good stuff: poetic language.

Look, we've all taken a stab at poetry at one point in our lives; it's nothing to be ashamed of, just like shredding your boss's unopened mail: everybody does it, because it reminds you of who you are. Poetry, as we all know, can tend to go hand in hand with a certain kind of language. Now you all know what I mean...I've thought about why this language works the way it does, and I even once had a triumphant moment--one of my very few in the world of academia--when I had an idea regarding a unresolved debate about the difference between two very well-known and oft-used types of poetic language: similes and metaphors. And I don't mean that the simile has "like" in it and the metaphor doesn't, I mean the REAL difference, shithead, as in, what does one convey that the other doesn't? Or, to take it even farther: IS there a difference? Hyman said, YES! There IS in fact a difference, and that difference lies in the fact that a simile makes a comment about the speaker's observation and comparison of the properties of two objects that are some level objective. If I were to say, "Moses Josh is like a rock," or, "Matt Finegood is like an empty swimming pool," I would be making a comment about Moses Josh's and Matt Finegood's properties (and those of the rock and the empty swimming pool) as observeable BY EVERYONE. Moses Josh is like a rock because he is strong like a rock; Matt Finegood is like an empty swimming pool, because nobody can float on his gentle ripples. These are things observable and experienced by everyone, and it is exactly this fact that I am describing with my simile.

However: if I were to say, "Moses Josh is a rock," or "Matt Finegood is an empty swimming pool," I'm saying something far more personal; that Moses Josh is a rock TO ME, or, to clarify, Moses Josh instills in me the emotions that the abstact notion of a rock does--NOT AN ACTUAL ROCK. When I say "Matt Finegood is an empty swimming pool," I'm thinking of Matt Finegood, and everything he means to me, and then I think of an empty swimming pool, and everything THAT means to me, everything that makes me feel, and know that the two are the same. Cool, huh?

Now, before you start sending me erotic pictures of yourself and stalking me at my home, wanting nothing more than a glimpse of me in the flesh and a garment with which to inhale my otherworldy scent, let me tell you that there's more. Oh yes. See, the problem with this whole thing--what was really hanging everybody up--is that, in order to know what ANY STATEMENT means, you theoretically should know that the PROPOSITION IT CONVEYS HAS A POSITIVE TRUTH VALUE. Shit, that's right. Thruth and meaning go hand in hand, and generally speaking, to know meaning you must perceive truth. The fucked-up thing about these metaphors is, that they always have a NEGATIVE truth value--Matt Finegood is not really an empty swimming pool, Moses Josh certainly isn't a rock, or a freight train, or a staunch Austrian governess, or any of the other things I've said about him--and yet we still understand them. The key to this, I supposed, lies in the fact that the metaphor is expressing emotion. And not just any emotion, but a strong, powerful, breast-beating emotion. And in doing so, they are using this whole truth-value problem to make a comment about the effects of those kinds of emotions. Their negative truth-value and their seemingly contradictory ability to be understood tells us something about the irrationality that these overwhelming emotions instill in us--a disconnect with the very nature of truth--and yet they are perfectly comprehensible, because we all feel them. And part of the way we communicate them the most effectively is through these metaphors, that not only tell of an emotional experience, but also the bewilderment that accompanies that experience. Here we have what appears to be a strange example of something that we thought before was impossible: a sentence that conveyes a false proposition, but communicates true meaning. Well, fuck. If I knew it was gonna' be this kind of party, I'da stuck my dick in the mashed potatoes.

So what do we learn from all this? We CAN express emotion. We can understand the communication of EACH OTHER'S emotions. We, collectively, as human beings, also understand that the experience of strong emotions can lead us to think and act in irrational ways--shit, THE IDEA'S BUILT INTO THE VERY NATURE OF OUR LANGUAGE. We SHOULD NOT FEEL SHAME FOR THE COMPLEX NATURE OF OUR FEELINGS AND RESULTANT SPEECH AND BEHAVIOR.

So why do I still feel bad and embarrased about all that shit I said the other night? And that shit I did last summer? And all that other stuff last year, and the year before? All I was doing was "feeling." All I was doing was being human. Moses Josh shakes his head, but it's all for show. He knows I've gotten to the bottom of something. Even if it is a cold damp well.