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Thursday, June 24, 2021

Inadequate

 When people talk about language being inadequate, I have to wonder. My idea is this: language is perfectly well suited to what it is supposed to do, so the idea that is falls short, somehow, is based on a misapprehension of what language does. If we think language is supposed to solve all sorts of non-linguistic problems, or represent reality in some transcendent sense, then of course it will be found wanting, since it cannot possibly do any or all of this in the first place. 

It would be a bit like finding music inadequate to cure cancer. 

The gap between language and reality is so gaping that it is not even a gap. Take the word Colorado and the state of Colorado. There is no way a word could represent the geological, biological, and human history of the state. Adding a few more syllables to the word or tweaking it in some way to make it a more adequate name for all of this would be pointless, because that's not the function of language. All the poets are wrong, is what I'm saying.   

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