Quote:Catch one if you can



As I tell my students, humans think in pictures. Our minds are full of images. We visualize things we like or dislike, desire, dream about, and want to achieve, then we encode those pictures and transmit them to others, or receive them from others, using something we call language.

Languages are like file formats — some people transmit TIFs, or GIFs, or PNGs, or JPGs. If you have the proper algorithms, you can encode and transmit your pictures to someone else, or decode their transmissions and rebuild their images in your head. If you don’t have the proper algorithms, then what you send or receive is gibberish.

There are three aspects to language: grammar, which is the actual grid on which the pixels (words) are laid out; logic, which is the bit size, or amount of information, in your pixels; and rhetoric, which is the bandwidth you use to transmit and receive.

The more accurate and sophisticated your aspects are, the higher the resolution, the greater the color depth, and the more accurate your transmissions are. The more languages you know, the more file types you can encode and decode, send and receive.

The interesting thing about languages is that each one adds its own flair to the images, with some being better at color reproduction, others higher in resolution, and still others offering faster and more accurate transmission. Pronunciation and enunciation are the means by which we attenuate the frequencies and control “noise” to ensure accurate transmission.


Some languages require a lot of bandwidth to transmit even simple images. Others are very efficient, with compression algorithms and self-correcting carrier waves. Some have vast amounts of metadata in the headers (connotation), while others almost none.

Idioms are highly specialized compression techniques, allowing large amounts of information to be transmitted with relatively few bits of data. Idioms are “function calls” that reference shared databases, like metaphors and allusions, that are culturally unique. For instance, I can say, “Mona Lisa,” and those eight sounds reference an entire cultural database that we share, allowing me to reference large amounts of information that I don’t need to transmit.

In language, resolution (# of pixels) is known as lexicon, or sheer number of words available. Latin has a lexicon of 40,000 words, Spanish has 93,000, Indonesian has 127,000, German offers 145.000, and Mandarin boasts roughly 375,000 words.

English has a resolution of 600.000 words, and possibly upwards of a million if one includes various jargons and specialized terms — the highest resolution language on the planet. As a writer, I am fortunate that English is my native tongue, and that my teachers were master artists when it came to painting verbal pictures. We might think of English as the TIF format of languages…uncompressed with high resolution and layers of data in the same file.



I am rather fastidious when it comes to the pixels, er…words I choose. I use them for their common definitions, as well as their etymology (history, origins). I especially do not allow special interest groups to redefine words to fit their agendas. Nor do I allow groups to arbitrarily change the grammar to purposely dumb it down. Both of these are deliberate efforts to seal off cultural databases with “dangerous” ideas, so that they can not be accessed by the general population.

We may not use “thou, thee, thy, thine” anymore, but we should still know what it means (informal “you”) and how to conjugate verbs with it. If not, then suddenly just about any English text pre-1800 is that much harder to decipher.

Spelling is absolutely vital to the English language. We have 16 vowel sounds, and spelling is the key to recognizing short and long sounds in written words. If you type “travelling” into Microshaft Word, using the English (United States) dictionary, it will be highlighted as incorrect. However, without the double “L,” the rules of grammar say that the word is pronounced “traveeling”. This is a subtle but effective way of walling off data from general access.

American English is under full-on attack. Someone is trying to block young minds from accessing information from the past. Efforts to normalize urban patois, or erase gender, or modify definitions are purposely blocking people from accessing information. They are manipulating our pictures to ensure we can not see accurate images from the past.


They are actually trying to create a New Speak dictionary, in which there is no concept of “liberty,” “freedom” or “individual”. We can not see information that is not there.

For example, English is one of the least gendered languages I can think of, certainly among the European language groups. The only gender in English grammar is third-person singular pronouns (he, she, it), and a handful of nouns (actor/actress, aviator/aviatrix). Perhaps some Asian languages, like Indonesian, have even less gender built in, but languages like German and French are incomprehesible without noun gender.

Language is an incredible tool. It allows us to see the pictures that were in the minds of humans thousands of years ago, but only because we have the algorithms to reconstruct them. If we allow those algorithms to be deleted, then even English will become as inscrutable as Egyptian hieroglyphics were before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

Language and culture are inseparable. Language is how we transmit our hopes and aspirations, history and traditions, experience and warnings to future generations. That is why it is under attack.

Someone wants us to be cast adrift, without a past or a future, unable to transmit our pictures and form communities of those who share those pictures.

If a word is a color, then connotation is the hue and saturation. Someone is trying to change the color of the sky to green, and make it a dark forboding green at that. They want us to be repulsed by colors like “freedom” and “individual,” and see repulsive colors like “servitude” and “collective” as bright and gay.

Just now, did the word “gay” conjure images of “happy, carefree,” or “homosexual males”? If the latter, then your language is being manipulated.

For those who dispair that we humans have no power, it is time to realize that power spills from your lips every waking moment. Power flows from your fingers at every keyboard, and with pen and paper. Power swirls like a maelstrom in your mind, whether you channel it to useful work or not.

If you are an English speaker, you have an arsenal of 26 characters, with 44 phonemes, and well over 600,000 rounds of ammunition. If you are a polyglot, you multiply your power with additional arsenals. Like electricity, though, if it is not harnessed and channelled from source to load, then it does no useful work — it communicates nothing, it creates nothing, it defends nothing. You can not hit a target if you do not aim at it.

Our most cherished inheritance and most valuable legacy is our language. We must protect it with our lives and transmit it to our children. There is nothing that empowers us more than the language we so often take for granted. Language is the pavement that turns a path into a road.

"Si non possum caelum moveo, infernum erigam,” said Julius Caesar. If I can not move Heaven, then I shall raise Hell.

Our film of the day comes in the form of a documentary called The Linguists (2008), which follows two language specialists across literal hell nad high water to document and preserve languages on the verge of extinction — an amazing story about language and passion.