“Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”
—
Hunter S. Thompson (via whokilled) (via charmingortedious) (via creeperstatus)
I need to read more Thompson. I feel like his cynicism is in line with my own, and his brand of humor/intelligence/awesomeness is just plain fun to digest.
For the most part, words feel ineffective to me. Whether it’s because I think I have a tighter grasp on them than others, or because I’m just a nihilistic English major, the weight people place on them sometimes astounds me. I don’t dislike poetry, but I loathe the passion with which some people read and analyze it. Any of those poems could’ve been created by chance in a random assignment of letters. While the odds one will end up with Romeo & Juliet staring back are incomprehensible, the possibility is there. And that mere possibility is all one really needs to make a claim against the validity of language and meaning.
It’s with that mentality I tend to approach the world. Nothing is truly amazing or beyond possibility (at least nothing that I have witnessed), and words do nothing or very little to argue the counter. Beyond simple definitions, words take on the individuals’ own meanings. My image of a chair is different than yours, and your image of a lake is different than mine. Of course, there may be a good number of similarities between our varying chairs and lakes, but these are learned through culture and society. After all, the word kursi means nothing to you, but someone who spoke Arabic would be evoking their own image of a chair. So when people try to make words like love universal, I become physically agitated by the idea.
But here I walk, trying to be a writer and taking classes that focus solely on meaning and words. I enjoy it. Maybe they hold no real meaning or only signify our own cultural upbringing, but they are one of the few methods of truly universal communication, and not to be confused with understanding. We can communicate and exchange ideas with words, but to claim words represent some kind of truth or universal emotion/idea is a downright scary thought.
(note: The best part about this is that I’ve completely contradicted my own point by trying to explain how I feel, but that’s how it goes.)
Reblogged from Creeper Status Master Lurk.
July 13, 2009, 7:47pm
