At the risk of boring the fuck out of you more than ever, I want to share some thoughts I have had lately about something. I was thinking about words and language and how it works. Words are very interesting, well not these ones, but words are interesting some of the time.
I guess the most obvious thing about words is the wacky mix of fun or damage words can make, depending on how they are used. But that isn't really what I was thinking about. What I was thinking about was related to thinking.
In the event that I think, the act of thinking is something like me using a little voice inside my head to compose sentences and phrases. I can't be sure, but I assume that's how it works for most people. With my inner voice I will say, "what do I want for lunch?" Or it might say, "Hey look, there's a fat bird sitting on that fence that looks like a soccer ball." From these examples you can see that my thinking is done with internal words.
So what I wonder is, if I didn't know any words would I be able to think? If you were a human being who was raised by wolves would you be able to compose your thoughts? Or would you only be able to think about the things that you could communicate with screams and punches. And if so, would your thoughts be nothing but things that related to shrieking and biting?
I suppose you can also imagine things visually, picturing them in your mind. I guess that those kinds of thoughts could work just like connecting words, but that won't cover a lot of the things you can think about but that don't look like anything, like feelings. This could be the reason why mimes are so irritating.
What I'm getting at is that I use words inside my head to organize my thoughts. My thoughts may be more or less chaotic, or just plain stupid, but the words are a tool to link them all together. For example I may be thinking about how to coerce a fat guy into belly flopping onto a wedding cake, or wondering if male fish have wangs, but the thinking is done with words.
It also occurs to me that articulate speakers have a way of organizing words to say a lot with a little. I wonder if their articulo-ararity also helps them to organize their thoughts better. I wonder if their thoughts are clearer and make more sense. The opposite example would be children, it could be the case that since they usually don't know a lot of words that's why they tend to make no sense. So their explanations of things and their ideas are basically garbage.
Another amazing thing about words is that we don't just have to use words to think about things that exist. We even can use words to describe things that don't actually exist, like unicorns, the female g-spot, or a funny German. Words can be used to imagine things or situations that presently don't exist but could. I can imagine something I really want to happen, or something that would crazy suck, like the sky raining leeches or something.
Oh, and also words can be used to communicate with other people too. But that is usually a lot more trouble. My tongue has got me into pretty much all the best and worst situations in my life. Mainly it works for me, but sometimes is works against me, and when it does, aww snap!
I probably say the right thing to people about 10% of the time, but I do get close most of the time, and I fuck it up terribly the rest. Although I have noticed that I put my foot in my mouth, I'm not the only one. I find myself shaking my head quite often at the astonishing things people say to me, just like they must shake their head at some of the babble that comes out of my mouth. But I suppose that goes with the territory of dealing with other people, and all of us having to put up with each others bullshit.
A good example of such bullshit was this little piece of writing. Lately my writing contains about as many interesting surprises as a game of Trivial Pursuit between Mike Tyson, that woman who stars on the TV show Alias and the dog from Frasier, so not many. I think we all would bet on the dog being the winner since he is hands down the smartest.