We say the same things over and over again but we say them better every time
I am very fascinated by the mystery of language. We don’t ever have a complete picture of what any of the words we use mean.
Consider the most simple of words that we use countless times per day. The word “I”. I am happy, I am sad, I am here, I am on my way. What is “I”? What does it refer to? Therein lies a cosmic mystery that very smart people like Douglas Hofstadter have written 400-page long books about.
In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.
- Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363
It is not just the word “I” that is a mystery, but pretty much every single other word. When you say I am “happy”, what is “happy”? There’s another opportunity for a five-hundred page book, or a several thousand word wikipedia page. Every word you can utter can beget its own wikipedia page; hours and hours of analysis and citations and examples and references and etymological history, just for the word “happy” or for the notion of being.
It is mind-boggling that any of it is able to make even a shred of sense to us. Someone asked years ago on twitter, “is anyone else bothered by the fact that you can only define words with other words?” Yes, yes indeed, I am perplexed by this every day, the infinite web of concepts and associations that makes up ordinary human language.1
But here is the wonderful cheat-code about us humans: we can understand words, we can somehow take this infinitely recursive system of symbols and, over course of a childhood and life, make sense of it. A child begins by understanding the most “basic” words like “mom” and “dad”, their favorite foods, their favorite toys. Over time their vocabulary expands and they build a mastery of language. But the entire time—in my view at least—they never complete the mastery, because no human ever fully understands what words mean.
Here is the theory of “meaning” I subscribe to2: we build up our understanding of words over repeated life experience. The meanings of words take shape to us over time. When you are a child, “mama” means warmth, care, love, protection, food. “Mama”, to an infant, is the source of everything, the protector, mama is God itself. As the child develops they begin to recognize their mother as an individual human being, sort of like them. They register “mother” as a thing that exists in countless instantiations: everyone has their own mother. As they develop further they get to know their own mother as a person, her particular personality quirks and shortcomings and behaviors, what your mom approves of and disapproves of. What I am saying, basically, is that the word “mother” continues to take on more and more layers of meaning as you get older. As an adult, you read stories about motherhood, your read about histories of motherhood, your consume mythologies about motherhood, and your understand of “mother” gets deeper and deeper.
This seems to be the case for us for every word. You begin to understand “happiness” with more nuance, you understand the fine-grained texture of “I” better over time, the word “death” begins to mean more and more.
I am sometimes uneasy about how repetitive life is, how repetitive our utterances are. How are you, I am good, how are you, I’m pretty well, oh my God, I miss you, what is this, I love you, I want it, who am I. We say these things and we ask these questions over and over again. Is life just one big TikTok reel playing over and over again endlessly? Am I doomed to repeat myself over and over again? Of course not. You get a little bit closer to the heart of the matter each time you speak.
Do you think when a small child asks “daddy are you awake”, they know what the word “awake” means? When a first-grader says “I’m sad”, that they know the depth of what sadness is? When we speak of “the world” and “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” that we have any idea what we speak of? We don’t, yet we dare to speak nonetheless. We go all the way to the end of life with this rich and as-yet-incomplete picture of what this world is, what any of it really means, what the words really point to, we finish our life just barely understanding who we really are.
Thanks to Kenan for feedback on drafts. Cover photo is “Topological Zoo” by Anatoly Fomenko.
The answer to “how do we learn words if you can only define words with other words” is that we learn them through interaction with the world, and through observing their usage, which is how dictionary definitions are produced in the first place. (Thanks to my friend Kenan for reminding me of this.)
See Chapman, Wittgenstein, Hofstadter, and Hayakawa, I honestly have not read that much of the theory but this is my understanding of it.