Many word-users mistake words for language, is usually how it works.
If that’s you, you can stop making the mistake with one simple technique:
Don’t do it.
Why bother?
Mistaking one word for another is the biggest mistake you can make.
Don’t do it.
For your own good and for the good of others.
I know what I’m talking about from personal experience.
Einstein
Maybe you know him, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about an altogether different Einstein, a (Swiss) TV show that “reports weekly on current and profound topics from all areas of knowledge.”
On June 1st, Einstein-the-TV-show’s topic of knowledge was “Miracles of language.”
Who wouldn’t want to know everything there is to know about miracles?
I don’t know about you, but I decided to watch it…only to discover a total absence of miracles. Instead of miracles, Einstein-the-TV-show simply did what many word-users do, they mistook words for language.
It’s the biggest mistake you can make because it prevents you from knowing the first thing about either.
When you mistake one word for another, such as words for language, Einstein-the-TV-show inadvertently confirms there are no exceptions, not even a TV show that is usually a 10 out of 10.
Mistake words for language
Mistaking words for language is a common mistake among word-users.
Word-users do not only often mistake words for language, but they just as often love to blame their mistakes on each other, or failing that, on something else.
In the case of mistaking words for language, they love to blame it on the world wide web, also known as the internet.
The internet gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than anything invented for that purpose before.
This is how the internet mistakes words for language.
- “A word is a basic element of language.” – Wikipedia “the world’s most-read reference work” (click here for the complete work of Wikipedia’s word).
- “The English language contains several hundred thousand different words.” – ComputerHope “the free computer help since 1998.”
- “Word: A single unit of language.” – The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary
- “A modern dictionary for a modern world that represents language visually.” – VISUWORDS™
- To name a few
Conditioned like that, is it any wonder that the word-users and their children routinely mistake words for language?
I think not, but from Einstein-the-TV-show I expected more than simply more of the same.
You can ask why of course.
After all, that’s what words are for.
To illustrate, let me briefly tell the stories of both words and language.
With language a word that couldn’t be anything else if it tried, let me tell the story of words first.
The story of words
In the wordless world
In the wordless world Before Words — which continues as we speak — nothing that you have a word for exists for self-evident reasons.
In the wordy world
In the wordy world After Words, everything you know is a word.mistake, language, universe, sun, moon, stars, atoms, particles, energy, electricity, fire, air, earth, water, insect, plant, animal, and newborn, to name a few, exist for equally self-evident reasons.
But there’s more to it.
Word-users can clearly see that words and language are different words. They don’t even look the same. Just as you cannot be someone else because that someone else is already taken, so words is taken by words and language is already taken by language.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
I’m not one to make up new opinions.
- “In the beginning is the word.” – Word-masters
- “Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself.” – Patrick Rothfuss
- “What a word means, a sentence cannot say.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Everything you have a word for is a word.
- Everything you know is a word.
- Words are what you respond to.
- Words are how you aim at what you’re looking for.
- A word is in the beginning of everything you have a word for, you included.
- The appearance of words has revolutionized evolution.
- Words have not only changed everything you have a word for, they create it.
- Words are a gift we’re meant to keep.
- Words don’t describe the world, they merely describe how we see it.
- Words have not only changed what we see, but how we see.
- Words are the limits of your world. Once you see that, they cease to be the limits of your world.
- Words are not taught at school.
- The story of words is not told.
- Word-masters have known that in the beginning is the word since the beginning of words.
- Word-users love to use their words.
- Words tend to get mistaken for evidence, and we often treat them that way.
- If you have a word for it, it’s a word.
- If you ignore what words can do to you, then you can have no empathy for what words can do to others.
- Words do not matter (they possess zero electric charge).
- Words have no meaning.
- Words can be denied only by confirming them.
- Words defy our understanding of how evolution works.
Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.
In the wordy world, Part 2
If word-users mistook their friends for their enemies, their friends would speak up.
However, expecting words to speak up presupposes they have the organs required to speak.
The story of language
Language is a French word.
Language the French word is based on the equally French langue.
Translated to English, the French langue becomes tongue.
Had those in charge of English words taken the pain to translate language, we would now be talking of tonguage.
In other words, we’d now know what we’re talking about.
Luckily, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
Luckily, it’s never too late to learn that we’re not the only specie with a tongue.
Many of the other 8.7 million animals have tongues, too.
It follows that the number of tonguages spoken is equal to the number animals with tongues.
“Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?” – Marcel Marceau
