The Word

In the beginning of the human species, was the word. It's such a common thing that it's hard to see it's significance, but the use of sound or utterance in this way is as distinctive a feature of homo sapiens as the giraffe's neck or the elephant's trunk, though of course a good deal more momentous. Other species use sound as signs or signals, but those are much simpler evocations of a single response. The word, on the other hand, is a sound with deep and complex roots in an individual's personal experience, with similar but never identical depths in both its speaker and hearer.

One of the best illustrations of this is in fact the 1962 version of the film The Miracle Worker. We see the child Helen Keller being taught a large number of signs, using touch and hand signals, but as her teacher understands all too well, and with near despair, for all that she still doesn't understand a single word. Then, in the climactic scene, we see the sudden acquisition of her first actual word, "water" -- followed by an avalanche of learning, as she demands to know word after word.

The problem she had was just the huge multiplicity of experiences that go together to make that first simple word -- water to drink, water in containers, water from a pump, water splashed in her face, water running in a stream, and on and on. And all of that is just a hint of the penumbra of meaning that even such a small word accumulates for all of us -- water of life, water as cleanser, baptismal water, water as a subclass of fluid, water as a superclass of its forms (salt water, ice, vapor, etc.) and on and on again. Little wonder it took a child so handicapped, bright as she was, so long to make the breakthrough that, on the species level, inaugurated all of human culture, and then all of history.

It's interesting, in fact, to look at how the word functions in culture. Consider a simple two-person conversation, a micro-example, perhaps, of a cultural group. Each word spoken is a sound that mediates between the mental experiences of speaker and hearer. The meaning of a word to the speaker is based upon that person's accumulated experience in learning and then using the word, and the hearer of the word cannot help but recognize it -- meaning that the sound triggers an involuntary activation of the neural circuits formed in the course of the experiences that constitute the "meaning" of the word to the hearer. Those experiences must be unique to the hearer, so that meaning can never be exactly the same as the meaning for the speaker, but at the same time, for communication to occur at all, it must approximate that meaning. We can see the conversation, then, as an experience in itself, that affects the meaning -- i.e., the neural/mental circuitry -- for both participants, tending to iron out discrepancies of meaning. And this micro example of a cultural group can be extended to all the larger and more persistent instances of such groups, the harmonizing of meaning, at all levels, being what defines them as such. This is one of the bases for cultural adaptation or evolution.



Jun 14/20