Philosophy of Language

What do words really mean? What is the concept of language and how did we, the entire world, come to understand such context? This is not really a question of, what is a word, but a question of the idea of a word and how we relate to their meanings. If you stop and analysis the above sentences for a long enough period you'll come to question what the words are and how they received their meaning. Language is one of the most majestic forms of our existence today and in the past. If you think about it, language is the reason we have a past, language is the way we communicate ideas to the future. This is how we understand cavemen, or ancient Egyptians. To use, they are figures drawn on a wall but to them it was like opening up up book. How can that be language? Pictures depicted on a wall doesn't sound like a well crafted sentence. This is what I believe Bernard Cooper is trying to address in the passage Rain Rambling through Japan.

In this short excerpt from the Maps to Anywhere novel Bernard address the above issues in a fascinating way. There is a girl, the main focal point, who attends a writing composition class. In this class the girl decides to use her own words in essays, words she came up with. The girl is of course ridiculed because most teachers are right brained, unlike Professor Darling, that however is beside the point.Back to the story, even thought the girl was criticized for using words she made, the teacher, at the end of the essay actually uses one of those words in a sentence.

This is fascinating to me, mainly because language fascinating. If you are an avid believer of evolution then this concept should be easy to grasp. Like the human evolution process there is a language evolution were words get added to our everyday use. Typically this process would take years but in the novel it seems almost like it takes hours, mainly because the story is a page long. Regardless, the word is added to the vocabulary of the teacher making the word have power. But really the word wouldn't mean anything without the other words that surround it. Words that some time ago went through this same process of evolution.

The take away from this is that words don't give meaning we give words meaning. If this statement is true than anything that comes out of a humans mouth is essentially a word. A new born baby that mumbles and yells nonsense is creating its own language to understand life. Just like the girl in the essay, she creates her own set of language to make sense of the items and experiences that surround her. She is at first considered crazy but then considered a visionary. It sure is a good thing that there are a lot of crazy people in the word because without them we would probably never have new words.