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Last night, while in bed, just before drifting off, for some reason I started thinking about how incredible language is. I wondered how the first person to come up with certain words was able to articulate what they really meant. With some words it is easy. You say "rock" and point to a rock. Then you point to a different kind of rock and say "rock" again etc.But what about words that you come up with for more abstract concepts? Last night it was the word "hope". It's wonderful that there is a word for "hope" but how on earth did the first person explain to others what it was they were naming? How did he/she even decide that the particular nebulous concept of hope even needed a word?
I started to consider how the originator might have begun to explain hope and then I started to wonder what exactly is the difference between hoping, wishing, wanting, and praying. We all feel a difference between all the words because we have spectacular brains, but if you had to explain the difference to someone who didn't know, how would you do it? How did we learn it? Was it just by hearing the words in context so many times? And how did those people before us learn it?
It's a virus. Lauri Anderson was right. We caught it from our fore-fathers.
Speaking of hoping, wishing, praying, and wanting, please click on the image above and enjoy.
2 comments:
My spectacular brain says thank you for sharing a slice of your spectacular brain in this forum.
Coincidentally, in my 7th period class today, we were reading and discussing the chapter in Sandra Cisneros' novel "The House On Mango Street" where the narrator discusses what her name means. Her name is Esperanza, which is Spanish for "Hope." On a somewhat related note, the Spanish word, "nada" (used with heavy significance in Hemingway's short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place") means "nothing." That same utterance (na-da) in some other language (I forget which one- Croatian, maybe?) actually means, you guessed it, "hope."
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