MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

By Julian Cloran.
Examining how people talk so much and say so little.

If you say, ‘tap water,’ it’s assumed you refer to a running source of some kind—i.e. a kitchen sink, or a bath. Who would react as though, instead, it described a tactile operation like touching the keypad of a mobile phone? No one rational, surely. Even cretins appear capable, on a regular basis, of recognising when it is inappropriate to take language literally. This recognition process involves the surrender or absence of imagination and takes place automatically during conventional social interaction, facilitating the mutual convenience of those using words to address each other, while, at the same time, nullifying our potential—as people—to develop our powers of expression and enhance our communicative skills.
Language succeeded grunting as a tool, which is frequently misused today. As ‘bad workmen blame their tools,’ so, too, poor communicators blame the limitations of language (in so doing clutching at a straw of a tenuously conceptual nature) for their personal verbal shortcomings. They are not inarticulate; ‘it’ can’t be put in words!
The mundane swapping of (often-insincere) pleasantries and clichéd phrases, as formulaic as the situations they are employed throughout, is responsible for the typical disengagement of the minds creating them, who involve themselves in daily dialogues of a trivial nature, yet, seemingly ritualistic importance. The neurotic compulsion to expel air vocally with others, however unnecessarily, reveals that the emotional needs of people are no more sophisticated than those of sheep.
If ‘talk is cheap,’ we sow as we will subsequently reap when—unthinking—we are verbal spendthrifts! Say what you mean and mean what you say, before your mind drifts. Think, atleast, before you link together the words your mouth will utter in making contributions to usually forgettable conversations that are unoriginal, conveying nothing apart from their participants’ inability to transcend their social conditioning.
Why bother creating sound waves devoid of legitimate content or meaning? It almost parodies peacocks’ narcissistic preening, but atleast when they display their tales it’s impressive. Conversely, the predictable related tales of people, too often, reveals a boring depressive.