Professor Nolan Chessman GS 102 Pre-College Writing 16 July 2013

Making Sense of Made up Words

Language has never been my strong suit. I find it hard to believe that there are actually people that study it, linguists they call them, seeking a greater understanding from a collection of made up characters and letters. Even now, the way that I am writing, I can't explain how I am putting together these thoughts and to be honest I'm not even sure if these thoughts are my own. I find myself writing down things I've heard others say before, or phrases and vocabulary that I've seen in my favorite books (though it's not the best way to write an essay I seem to have managed so far) and I scramble to catch these ideas and thoughts in the exact way that I hear or see them... but there are far too little words in the world to describe all of the different ways we feel things. This is noticed whenever I am fingering through a thesaurus looking for the next bunch of letters to explain my ideas or when I try to have a conversation and I must pause to explain my point of view properly. I continue to struggle, reaching for the right tools, the right words, but nothing ever seems to come out just the way that I'd hoped. There is a skill in using a system that we've created that I just don't fully comprehend.

Sometimes this struggle is shown in the way we perceive our surroundings. We look up at the sky at night and we are compelled to say that it is

beautiful, because that is the right way to use the word beautiful; it is pleasing to the eye, it is full of beauty. But it is much more than that. It is dark, mysterious, wholly unusually and very, very vast. Sure, it is beautiful, but to just call it that is just scratching the surface of what it actually is. To call the space above our heads that our universe expands in as "just beautiful" is a lie. As Kate Ray states in "On Words as Stars", "The truth is, though, words lie. Nothing can lie as much as words." In her essay she elaborates on a similar problem of how we try to find the right words to explain our experiences, but ultimately they fall short of the truth. In one part of her essay she explains how even a Vietnam war veteran that writes about the horrors of war can never accurately represent the actual experience, stating that "For him, Vietnam was war and all its attending mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity [ . . . ] (446). Yet even writing these words, reducing his essay to that list, is not completely true." (Ray 2) I could look up at the sky and say that it looks "beautiful", or I could pull up some information on my laptop about specific details in the sky that make it beautiful like constellations and other planets and stars, but I'd rather do neither. To just observe and feel the way that I do when I see such a sight is so many different descriptions and none are the ones I know right now.

Language is nonetheless important, even if it doesn't really best portray our emotions and experiences. Being the social creatures that we are we need a way to be able to connect with each other and the best way seems to be through language. When we share our thoughts, even the shallowest and crudest of

them, we give others a bit of a peek of how we see things. With this, we empathize with each other; this is how we connect. When we like a particular aspect of another person's point of view, we absorb them. For me this is true when I use language. When I like the way that a person expresses themselves I admire it, I let it become a part of the way I write and so my writing changes little by little. I "borrow other people's traits", like how I borrowed this phrase from Kalam's essay, "Lusting for Literacy." Sadia Kalam also does a similar collecting of other people's characteristics which she explains in her essay. Kalam's essay used various examples of how the traits of other people eventually became part of her own, being the humor of one person or the patience of another. However, the main characteristic she explains most elaborately was that of lust, specifically lusting after a handsome boy's desire to understand the Qur'an, describing him as having "his head was dutifully bowed over the Quran, as if his mind were devouring the words." (Kalam 1) Lust becomes the most important feeling to Kalam as her lust for becoming literate in Arabic drove her to understanding the Qur'an, she wanted to "devour the words" like the handsome boy did.

I have never really "lusted" after these traits out of admiration like Kalam, though I do feel that I need them. Without these traits that I've gathered my ideas would be difficult to follow as they sometimes are. If I didn't borrow what I admired from others how would I be able to connect with others? When I first came to New York as a really young child I had no knowledge of the English language and spoke in simple Spanish; it would have been the equivalent of broken English,

almost. It wasn't because I was uneducated either, I was simply very shy and didn't like saying more than a few words to ask my parents for something, or briefly point out things that interested me. I remember when I started attending school, when we were asked to write, I was always short on words (which for a while never really bothered me). However, when I started to see what others were writing in the middle of my elementary school years my essays paled in comparison. My peers were using very vivid language to describe a summer vacation, or their favorite thing, or other things our teachers requested. The way that they used words was much different from the way I used them, that was the first time that I felt that I could "see" what others wrote about. Words like "fantastic" and descriptions like "rippling" caused me to imagine things of that description and also sounded and looked much nicer than my use of "good" and "wavy." So I began to incorporate new words into my lexicon of vocabulary, like the word lexicon I learned from my middle school history teacher. My goal then was to let people see how I saw things the way I was able to see when I read their work.

The words I reached out for and claimed for my own served the purpose of making others take my work seriously as well. As Amy Tang's essay, "Mother Tongue", states, having language skills that come off as "imperfect" make people believe that our "thoughts are imperfect" too. Her essay explored upon the different kinds of English she spoke throughout her daily life. Being an author, her English was advanced and so was one way that she spoke when she is in front of an audience. However, she was also the child of an immigrant and so her way of

speaking English to her mother was much different in comparison. Her professional English was used to keep the attention and respect of her audience, whereas her simple English was used for her mother and husband, which she explains as '...[having] become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with." (Tang 1)

To change the way that people perceived my ideas I learned to use these new words to form more interesting sentence structures and imagery; I found that the better I wrote, at least better to my teachers, the less criticism I had to put up with for my lack of colorful writing. Language did not matter very much to me though up until around high school. I watched a lot of television and wound up hooked onto the Discovery channel and the Science channel; it was then that people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku became my role models of putting my thoughts into words. I have not yet been able to gain such a mastery of words to inspire someone like myself to become so interested in science, but now I have something to aim for. Even now I try to experiment with the way that I talk, write and explain things. Maybe now I am lusting for this desire to use language powerfully enough to fill someone with wonder and realization, like how listening to Kaku explain string theory and time makes me feel.

I cannot lie to myself and say that I completely understand how to use language well; there are so many ways of expressing and communicating with others that I personally find to be better. Since my writing is not excellent (I usually use a

very cut-and-dry method I learned in high school) I replace the need to show how I feel by other means. Sometimes I play the piano and learn a new piece that evokes a feeling in me I've never felt before; I then play to others sometimes to show them what moves me and leave it up to them to interpret it. Other times I will draw and create images that constantly race through my head, strange sketches and warped images of reality that I give to my friends. In a sense writing is very similar, you create, present and let the person figure out the rest of it's meaning on their own. However, music and drawing is a lot more tangible than words on a page. You can see the colors, you can feel the sounds, but you can't pluck and take apart a series of words without losing part of what it stands for, losing part of the truth.

Amazingly, language still manages to cause me to feel intense and sometimes overwhelming amounts of emotion, especially when it's about something I feel strongly for. I know I've read an amazing piece of writing or heard an inspiring lecture when my skin tingles and I feel, just... there isn't the right word for it. I feel that I can understand and empathize with what the writer or speaker is saying. When I've felt like I have just taken a peek through someone's perspective of the world I can't help but to feel a bit giddy. The way language feels like a kind of magic, taking thoughts and putting them into other people's heads to analyze them, is the greatest thing that I admire about it. It may not be my favorite thing to study or write about due to my limited understanding of it, but there is a purpose to being able to express one's thoughts; there is purpose in connecting with others.

Works Sited

1. Kalam, Sadia. Lusting for Literacy. NYU. N.p. Web. 16 Jul 2013. Nyu.edu http://www.nyu.edu/cas/ewp/kalamlusting04.pdf 2. Ray, Katie. On Words as Stars. Web <July 2013> http://www.nyu.edu/cas/ewp/rayonwords04.pdf 3. Tan, Amy. Mother Tongue. Web <July 2013>. http://teachers.sduhsd.k12.ca.us/mcunningham/grapes/mother%20tounge. pdf