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Words, words, words…

Don’t you sometimes wonder why something terribly obvious escapes your notice? Something that, had you thought about it for even a moment, would have struck you as not only interesting, but perhaps even profound -like inferring the presence of gravity from the fall of an apple? Like understanding that speaking a simple sentence involves past, present and future before it is even complete?

Okay, I got that last epiphany from an essay on my phone[i]. Still, that doesn’t make it at any less fascinating, if not immediately intuitive. But when you think about it, the now we inhabit is microscopically tiny compared to the past we have to plumb to come up with the idea. The appropriate words we want to use are stored in our memories, and we have to hold them in our thoughts through the pinhole of the present while we wonder how to put them together in some meaningful order that is still in the future until we utter them… Interesting, eh?

And the poor listener has to utilize their past to understand the meaning of the words they hear, and, all while trying to process them in their tiny spotlight-present, anticipate the probable future syllable or word that they remember you are just uttering, before it slips away again into their past… And let’s face it, if a sentence is complicated – or they’ve predicted wrongly – they could flounder in the current of incoming speech while straining to figure out what was just said as the words disappear into the past. Frankly, I don’t know how either of us do it.

‘Language exists in this tenuous space between the cognitive demands of the disappearing past and the nebulous future.’ There is a time pressure in talking to someone that isn’t merely contingent on whether they stay interested long enough for you to finish the sentence. Maybe that’s what keeps conversation interesting, though: it’s a balancing performance of memory, prediction, and guessing the correct meaning of the sounds. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks kind of thing.

‘A subtle compact exists between speaker and hearer: the speaker, eager to avoid the time-consuming steps of planning a complex sentence, can afford to jettison linguistic information that is readily inferred while making the effort to utter that which is not… Every utterance reflects a split-second decision about what to explicitly say and what to leave implicit, a balancing of the time it would take to plan and utter a phrase against the hearer’s ability – or need – to quickly recover its meaning if it were left unspoken. Languages reflect the accumulation of such decisions over historical time, congealed into grammar.’

Of course, along with our semantic tools, ‘we have developed the social skills to negotiate understanding – the nod to confirm that we’re following, the furrowed brow when we’re not, the patience with a speaker’s disfluencies and backtracking, the ability to instantaneously repair misunderstanding – so that our language is not grounded by its imperfections.’

I mean, isn’t speaking to people amazing? I tend to forget a lot of these things when I’m talking to myself around the house, even if I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say. I mean, I’m  just practicing for the bus, eh? One has to exhibit acceptable social skills to get the person sitting beside you to listen and not immediately pull the cord for the next stop.

Talking to yourself does not necessarily alert you to the miscreance of Time on a bus, though; at my advanced age, when words don’t flow as quickly, or predictably as they should, the compact between speaker and listener is not a given. They may have to listen, but they have no contractual obligation to reply; the response can be simply a polite smile, or a nod -which on a bus, may also be the result of the vibration, and not their interest. And on a bus you cannot -as I often do with the furniture or the plate on which I am loading food from the microwave- try to make a point with touch. You can be arrested for that I think.

I’m not sure just how time, in the ordinary sense that follows us through our lives, is applicable with strangers on a bus either. The tenuous space in which my words disappear in the bus-noise and the imminent threat of losing my thread of thought as they squeeze past me at their stop, certainly constrains any concerns I have about navigating the minefield of what past and future words to use unless I speak quickly. Anyway, I find my words are often neither appropriately delivered, nor gratefully accepted on a rush hour bus.

Maybe sentences no longer than two or three words delivered politely and apologetically on a busy bus, have no need to adhere to the criteria I have so meticulously outlined above. After all, even if my age-adjusted short-term memory would be up to so few words, it would be much easier to deliver them from the past-future word dichotomy into the pinhole of the present as my seat mate heads for the door.

But still, although living alone is probably great practice, maybe I don’t have to rehearse by thanking the washing machine at home for helping me out. Maybe I’m not expected to reply to the TV news with appropriate social signals just to make sure I’ve got them right. Still, although I don’t seem to have any trouble remembering what words I want to use when I answer the phone, I sometimes prevaricate when the caller asks questions whose words I cannot properly anticipate. I put that down to hearing issues, though. I mean there’s nothing wrong with my dealings with the future, except that it’s shorter than it used to be…

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/why-every-utterance-you-make-begins-with-a-leap-of-faith

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