The imminent danger of metaphor p1

Jean Aitchinson did a great job explaining me, maybe you [ if you did go to listen to the podcast], and a lot of wireless listeners; how we underestimate language.

COVID 19 AND THE MANY WORDS ADDED TO LANGUAGE

Without our knowledge, simply the COVID 19 has increased the number of words we use further away from Shakespeare or Cervantes. They wouldn’t have used virus or… Pandemic.

Tough daily life doesn’t require as many as a poetic ode to imply we’re going to the loo, any number. So we underestimate language by rating a raggaeton song’s listeners¹ to be unschooled just cause the song uses 30 words max.

WITTGENSTEIN, CONCEPT, KNOWLEDGE AND METAPHOR

Some time Tyrion Lannister said to John Snow: words don’t matter, they don’t mean anything. And I’m not quoting for I’m not to look up page and book where that was said. My point. Words don’t matter… Until we meet up with a philosopher.

Wittgenstein² would say they do. Once I listened to a fellow Japanese classmate ( UNAM philosophy student) to say he understood better Japanese than English since the concept is a derivate of word [ he mentioned the name of the philosopher who said so but I had forgotten it until I sat down to write this — probably I’ll forget it again once this is written]. For us to be able to KNOW something, the word to name it has to exist. You can’t seriously think «chair» unless you know its name. Which is kind of funny since we end up feeling mute if we don’t remember the name of the thing.

As a result, we might head into overestimate words

LANGUAGE AND POWER
Language is powerful. It had this spider web side in which we can get ourselves tangled. Spinned IN without noticing.
Underestimating it, we forget about persuasion by worrying about how nefarious and atrocious it ends being in this or that use. Banda music…
We writers work with miss or oppa³ persuasion all the time…

How other way were we to convince people, purple dinosaurs can spit fire? Reading Terry Prattchet is enough to understand WHY dragons are impossible. Fire does need fuel. It needs oxygen and it needs a high temperature. If you have a high temperature in an enclosed space, like a dragon’s belly, the thing explodes. What creature bigger than a bacteria is resilient enough to survive such temperatures? Maybe a snail.

LANGUAGE AND REALITY

<<Linguistic freedom was seriously put in doubt 85 years ago, first by Edward Sapir and afterwards by Benjamin Lee Whorf, both of them American linguists. Their ideas are known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Sapir said: «Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society… The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached… «>>

Is what Jean Aitchinson explains on the lecture following to the one I posted previously and which I will leave behind with a question: Do Chinese live in Mars just because their language is very different from English or Spanish?
Pasto kalo.

1. From the name of the virus — Coronavirus and its a lot less common symptoms like— apnea, fatigue, pulmonary obstruction, cutaneous eruption… Plus derivates such as: willingly quarantine, mortality, asymptomatic, K19 grade, sanitary measures, thrombosis, gen, risk group. That’s 13 new words! 13 new words for an average individual. ↩︎
2. Nein. Impossible. I barely speak the everyday Spanish language to get myself into the dark cramps of birthing philosophy in spite of stopping to think from time to time. Mostly in how I want to say common things. ↩︎
3. Some like girls, others; we look at the long male legs of telephone poles and before you even think ‘Aha asexual doesn’t exist!’, let me say this: I like looking. However, I don’t feel the slightest urge to touch. I’m fine JUST staring at pretty things. Some asexuals and aromantics won’t even think human bodies as worth enough the glance. We’re all different and still find similarities between us. ↩︎