In the wordless world
In the wordless world, nothing exists that word-users have a word for.
For self-evident reasons that includes good and picture.
In the wordy world
In the wordy world:
- Picture is a word
- Everything you have a word for is a word
- A word, any word, couldn’t be anything else if it tried
- Picture is mistaken to speak 1,000 words
This might make sense at first sight — especially the part about picture speaking, which presupposes that words have the organs required (to speak).
But unlike the word-users, words are void of organs.
And if you look a wee bit closer, you can clearly see that the invention of pictures predates the invention of words by 30,000 years.
This we know from cave paintings in different parts of the world that are 30,000 years older than the words that the first word-users began 30,000 years later to describe those cave paintings with.
And 43,750 years after the invention of pictures, we now believe that dance/pantomime, music, sculpture, and pictures/paintings are part of the classic arts.
What’s rarely talked about yet extra special about the classic arts is that they are older than words. But that’s about art, a different story altogether that will be addressed in a separate post when the time for art is right.
Back to pictures and words
In case you forgot, words were invented when the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet.
In other words, words were invented 13,750 years ago.
But we shall never know what happened after that because the witnesses are gone. All we can safely assume is that it was Event A or Event B before the other.
- Event A: When words were new, 13,750 years ago, our ancestors had to invent 1,000 words before they could even begin to accuse pictures of speaking as many.
- Event B: Our ancestors began to mistake picture — which at the risk of repeating myself is a word — for possessing the organs required to speak words, let alone 1,000 of them each.
Fact is, it didn’t take long for the majority of word-users to mistake words for what they aren’t.
Imagine that!
13,750 years later, Wikipedia speaks 2.916 words (about pictures), and any art critic worth their salt will find the number of words it takes to fill a book about the Lascaux cave pictures alone.
But no word-user today believes that words possess the organs required to talk because schools all over the world now finally teach that words are words, and the only ones with the organs required to use words are the teachers and students of words, that is the word-users.
But who am I, the author of THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY, to talk in turn?
I could be wrong.
Maybe schools all over the world still don’t teach the difference between the word and the word-user.
Maybe the 4 word-users below are right.
- ”Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school.” – Plato (2,500 years ago)
- “Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein (99 years ago)
- “The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.” – Marshall McLuhan (74 years ago)
- “When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” – Paul Simon (40 years ago)
Takeaway
The choices are there.
The decision is yours.
No other word or word-user can decide it for you.
