Words are what makes us human. We should be called Homo lingua not sapiens. We are not wise, but we run our lives and our civilization with words. Heraclitus (one of the first to consider these things) wrote on something he called the "Logos"
This Logos holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it
While "logos" did mean "word" in Greek it was more than that. It was the unifying rational principle that held the world of change and flux together. The Stoics believed that the source of all things were "logoi spermatikoi" - the seeds of being that emanated from the "Logos Spermatikos" - the primordial word. Aristotle put this into a political context:
Man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or herd animal ... For we assert nature does nothing in vain and man alone among the animals has speech. While other species may have voice, may have sounds and be able to distinguish pleasure and pain, speech [Logos] is more than the ability simply to distinguish pleasure and pain... logos serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful. And hence the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad, just and unjust and other things.
Words are like arrows that point to things that can't really be described in words; skillfull communication is the ability to get someone to understand what it is you are pointing at. We know when we are listening to a skillful communicator. Ronald Reagan was not called the "Great Communicator" for no reason. My personal feeling that he was dumb as a brick doesn't change the fact that I agree with this label. And he beat the crap out of Jimmy Carter and that is why we are in such terrible straits today. Experts agree that Reagan's "Morning in America" framing successfully put an end to Jimmy Carter's realism about sacrifice. Jimmy Carter told the truth, Ronny told a great story... And the people chose Ronny.
I like what is said in the Tao Te Ching ,
There are names but not nature in words.
There is a line between saying and doing, between description and understanding, between naming and nature, that is fundamental to human experience. Talking is important to us. Important, powerful speeches have inspired us, brought us to tears and enraged us. But, in the end, they are only words. The real measure of effectiveness is whether those words inspire people to do things. It's the doing that matters. Given human nature and the baggage that everyone carries with them it is a miracle that humans can communicate with each other at all.
Sometimes the world can seem like a very frustrating and lonely place where misunderstanding and confusion are the rule and understanding the exception. A wise person once told me, "What you hear depends more upon your state of mind and past history than upon who is speaking to you and the words they are using." I think about all the books I have read and the things I have come to understand from reading them. Words have been, and are now, an important part of my life. But my life is not something I have read about in a book. It's something I've lived. Words have pointed me the way, but I have done the walking.
The U.S. Census says there were 2,334,000 books published in the United States between 1880 – 1998. World Cat, an electronic connection to the world’s libraries, has 1.5 billion “items” among which are 27 million books. (This is individual titles, and substantially edited versions, not number of copies) The average book contains about 150,000 words. So, taking WorldCat’s numbers, we have somewhere around 4 trillion words in all the world’s books. If words were grains of sand – “medium” sand at 67 grains per inch – there would be 300,000 words in a cubic inch. A reasonable estimate for a handful would then be 4 million words. If words were grains of sand here are:
Don Quixote, 1984, Animal Farm, Beowulf, The Audacity of Hope, The Canterbury Tales, Leaves of Grass, Ulysses, The Gulag Archipelago, Going Rogue, Slaughterhouse Five, All the King’s Men, Les Miserables, The I Ching, The Bhagavad-Gita, Mein Kampf, The Iliad, Das Kapital, The Jungle, The Jungle Book, It Takes a Village, The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, Process and Reality, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Unabomber Manifesto, The Federalist Papers, Free to Choose and War and Peace.
Given the WorldCat numbers of 27 million books, and given that there are about 119 handfuls in a cubic foot, the words in all these books would make a 8,400 cubic foot pile of sand. .
. If words were grains of sand there is no possibility of even beginning to examine a small part of this massive work. And this work is growing. There are around 3000 books being published every day. And, then, along came the Internet.
Peter Norvig in a lecture gave a rough estimate that there are about 100 trillion words on the internet. (Granted, probably a lot of them are like "OMFG he's so hot!!!" which leads to the question of whether "OMFG" is one word or four.) That would be a 216,000 cubic foot pile. But this is not a static situation:
(PhysOrg) -- Originally, Moore’s Law described the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit, which doubles approximately every 18 months. Now, a team of researchers from China has discovered that Moore’s Law can also describe the growth of the Internet. In a recent study, the researchers have predicted that the Internet will double in size every 5.32 years.
The estimate for this blog, one of many, is that about 300 diaries are posted every day. If these diaries average 500 words that's 150,000 words per day. And then add on the comments - let's say another 150,000 words. That's 300,000 words per day. If words were grains of sand that would be about a teaspoon every day.
So, I wonder what it is I do here - as I type these words. What power is there in what I do here? Really precious damn little. Nevertheless, I add my grains to the stream and wait for some kind of response.
Writing is a solitary occupation that involves the hope that there will be a reader who understands. There are trillions of words being written by millions of people in that same hope. Some are better at it than others. But, in the end, it all adds to that stream of words that contributes its tiny weight to that sand sculpture we are all creating together. .
Since I'm writing about words I can't really avoid dropping some poetry. Poetry, I think, is the ultimate redeemer of our human wordiness.
Questions
Thinking in the darkness
in front of the papers on my desk
I began to wonder
if I could find an answer to anything
I began to question
and I entered the house of emotion
became darkened with the shadow of grief
and reddened with the heat of anger
My desire for answers began crying out
with the voice of a seabird
on an empty shore of endless sand
So I went to the sea In the pouring November rain
and I listened to the waves for answers
But I found no relief
And I went to the mountains
and inquired of the bear
He didn't answer,
He turned,
grumbling sleepily,
glared at me with one eye open and told me to go away
So I returned home
and I asked the wind and the rain for answers
and the water ran down my upturned face
and the trees whispered quietly
in a language
I cannot understand