Thoughts on a train

The philosophy of language

Crosswords are wonderful. I was brought up on them; I remember sitting up at the bench of my Granny's tiny kitchen as Grandad tried to define "decapitate" without traumatising my annoyingly curious 5-year-old self. Nowadays, crosswords help me to relax in ways that Netflix and junk food just can't do. Maybe it's my overactive need for achievement. Maybe it's nostalgia. Maybe I just like words.

We can all agree that of mankind's many innovations (which I need hardly remind you include such atrocities as the atom bomb and the air horn), language sits at the better end of the scale. It's an art form, and like any art medium, language expresses truths in ways unique to itself.

Language gave us Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hemingway, and the lyrical miracle of the "Baby Shark" song.

It was also used to write "Mein Kampf".

Words have power: we all know that, and if you don't, then the Grammarly ads on Youtube are happy to remind you with annoying regularity. Words have power, and to lose our language is to lose a part of that power. We have the right to free speech (a fact of which the porn industry and internet trolls are a sad reminder), but our speech is limited by the words we have to say. How do we convey an idea without the words to describe or explain it?

No-one could stay in New Zealand for an extended length of time without having a sense of the damage caused by the Treaty of Waitangi. The idea of the Treaty was primarily positive - two sovereign nations formally uniting to face the challenges of a new world. But as any self-respecting Iwi member or primary school student will be happy to tell you, the Maori got short-changed. The Te Reo Maori copy of the Tiriti o Waitangi didn't match up to the English one. They were essentially given a different contract to the Europeans, one that didn't express or explain the same ideas of rulership, sovereignty, or ownership as the English Treaty.

Whether the language disconnect was intentional, or simply the result of poor translation, the Maori tribes had agreed to the deal without full knowledge of what they were signing on for, or signing away. It wasn't the only cause for the war and division that followed, but 178 years later, we're still working to repair the damage done by that mistake. Our failure to find the right words, to find the right language; it scored a gash across the heart of our nation. Words have power.

Our words are shaped by our culture, and by our need for them. Just in the last ten to fifteen years, the increasingly mainstream LGBT exposure (or LGBTQQIAPS-AT2T-VBFCAHHO to the truly #woke - bonus PC points if you can pronounce it) has led to the creation of a whole new vocabulary - "intersex", "butch", "demisexual", "cisgender", etc. As society's view of what gender is changes, so our language grows and adapts to fit, giving us new (and sometimes confusing) terms for concepts that we are only now defining.

I was shocked the other month to find an article in my inbox about a music festival for women. This isn't a shocking thing by itself, in fact, considering the rise of violence and assault in the drug and drink-fueled environment. But the idea came from an original tweet written by Swedish comedian and radio host Emma Knyckare:

"What do you think about doing an awesome festival together where only non-men are welcome until all men learn how to behave?"

Girls, this is a PSA: we're not women anymore. We are non-men. And yes, I understand the idea behind it. I understand that Emma Knyckare was trying to be inclusive and open-minded when referring to issues of gender (though apparently not enough - she faced a lot of online backlash for the original comment, as it was apparently too specific, and later edited it to say "cis-gender men"). But this is an example of fear translated into language. We are afraid to state an idea as an idea. Our only frame of reference is to define something as not being the opposite.

To be a woman isn't a word or an identity separate unto itself now; a female identity comes from being NOT a man. It's Orwellian - bad, good, man, woman, they're not individual concepts, they're defined as opposites. Doubleplusgood. Non-man.

By giving us the medium with which to express our ideas, language controls the ideas that are expressed. Take away the word, and the idea itself is impossible. We cannot think a thought without the medium.

Today, we are losing our language. Words are disappearing faster than we can invent slang to replace them, and our wonderful gift of articulacy - of expression - is drifting away from us in a flood of misspelt tweets and Instagram captions. We need to respect the power language gives us, respect the freedom of expression that this country allows each of its citizens, and respect our right to speak, or be silent. We must protect our language, and the widest possible range of vocabulary it offers us.

I reserve my right to crosswords with esoteric clues. I reserve my right to speak with the full range and breadth of my language, to free thought expressed in specific and individual nouns, to a vocabulary that gives voice to any concept I can dream up. And I reserve my right to use words like sesquipedalian or bardolatry or ecdysiast, even if it's just for the sheer joy of sounding like a ponce every now and then.