Language And Thought

Each word in a language is a signal, a sign, a symbol that has at least a slim number of attached meanings.

Thought may be possible without language - but not *these* thoughts. We have wrapped the muscles of thinking around bones made from symbols; it is too late to become octopi again, even if we wished for eight lovin` arms and all those suckers.

So, we think by employing symbol sets. Sometimes, we need a whole lot of symbols to express a single idea, and we can create new words to express that when it is needful to do so (individually, then collectively). This gives rise to slang, jargon, and all manner of other such stuff, which melts into our set.

But while we are thinking in a given set, some things are easier to express (and easier to think), while others are harder. Some things are easier to obtain because we know their names.

I know that this feeling in my gut is hunger, and it means I need food. That's a nice sentence. This other feeling in my head is nicotine addiction, and it means I want a cigarette. I don't need to know "hunger" to feed it, but I need names for food to order it in the restaurant; I may need the name to identify it on the shelf in the grocery store, and I need a whole vocabulary to take part in a group pizza-ordering discussion.

I don't know what the twitchy-jumpy feeling in my leg is named, or what I need for it. A cramp, maybe? Some symptom of something? If I knew it's name, I could request information on what helps with that.

This stuff is so very, very basic to how we work that we don't even bother to think about it, and it seems weird to bother babbling about it.