mind your language

We have no qualms denying the existence of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Why do we have trouble stating that we have no god?

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My recently acquired fascination for linguistics hit a rather unexpected road-bump last evening. For months now, the charm, for me, has been in excavating word-roots - as you brush away the dust, masks of past civilizations emerge: tales of origin and evolution so wondrous that they seemed to encompass entire bed-time stories. As you swim in the waters of Sri Lanka and trudge up the mountains of Laconia, you for once see patterns in the darkness - word-roots light up like fallen stars in the dark ocean of vocabulary.

But all that's when I'm not at work.

At work, I've inched my way from an engineering position to one in a 'pure sciences' team. The evocative call of engineering a solution no longer entices me like it used to. While the language I use to work the computer has evolved - from the flamboyance of C++ to austerity of Bash scripts; surprisingly, my 'human language', has also transformed, morphing from a declarative 'The data proves that A causes B', to a less sure 'the data tells us that A causes B' to a feeble, almost apologetic 'the data seems to suggest that there exists a correlation between the two variables'.

The evolution, in retrospect, has been affected by the people I interacted with - the smarter you were, the more cautious, it seemed, you would be at stating things with certainty. Claims were padded with qualifications, and probabilities softened what were once concrete conclusions. Intelligence apparently lay in the recognition that things were never absolute - that the cognizance of subtlety was the cornerstone of wisdom. The notion seems to manifest everywhere really - in art which evolves from the overt, upturned semi-circular smiles on drawings stuck on refrigerator doors to the is-she-really-smiling Mona Lisa; in love stories, where an undercurrent of romance evokes a far stronger reaction than an in-your-face rain dance; and even in stygian world of insults - the intelligent often supplanting patent hostility and physical aggression with the delicate sharpness of sarcasm.

To be circumspect about what you know about the world, or at least state it in such parlance, it seems, is the ticket to sagacity. It's little surprise then, that it's the mode now to declare on any issue, one's position to be one of neither extreme.

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Language has its laugh in the end though: just when you believe that your perspective controls your vocabulary, it comes right back and 'au contraire's you. It has been long argued that the truth is diametrically opposite to our expectation - what you perceive is decided by the language you use and not the other way around. Last evening, I read one of the most fascinating experiments in linguistics perhaps, where it was shown that people were able to remember and distinguish colors for which they had names in their mother-tongue better than for those they didn't have words for. If the word doesn't exist in your head apparently, you brain ignores that facet of reality.

Read that again, for the implications of the assertion are quite startling. You don't see anything that you don't have a word for. You brain only perceives things that are present in its vocabulary.

Taken to its logical conclusion, if you didn't have a word for black, you probably wouldn't see it. I find that very hard to swallow - it just seems so counter-intuitive. But then I got thinking: was there an experience or a notion or an object that I discovered only after I learnt a word for it?

I learnt French (and a smattering of Norwegian) sometime over the last couple of years, and while doing so, came across a most beautiful word - 'enchanté' (pronounced somewhat like 'on-shan-they', only the 'on' is more nasal). It's a eccentric word, in that it doesn't have an equivalent in English (or any of the other languages I know), and reserved for men to use when they're introduced women. The closest English greeting is 'charmed', I imagine, but as if one had mixed it with dollops of the word 'enchanted'.

The greeting itself has a vein of unstated sexuality in it, something that the prudish English never bought into I guess. You've got to imagine it being said while delicately holding your paramour's hand, as the tips of her lips curve ever so slightly upward.

Here's the catch though: I know that it's only after I learnt the word that I began to notice the sexual spark that I felt when I met her - that rush of chemistry when the tips of your fingers first make contact with hers, in a kind of latent desire, if you must. You will too, from now on - the word's been introduced into your vocabulary - and now your experience of reality has forever changed.

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But that's just one side of argument.

I think the crux of today's intellectual indolence is directly attributable to the fact that we're now using neutral language more than ever before. Our unsure language has cast us in a brain that can house only unsure thought. No longer is it acceptable to state your claim. To aver that one side of the argument is right, and that the other is wrong.

It is unsurprising then, that the voice of the atheist, for example, is dismissed as hubris, an overbearing arrogance characteristic only of the ignorant. The unqualified refutation of the presence of a supreme being seems to suggest naïvete, an unnecessary presumption of certainty.

Instead, it is prudent to state that you're agnostic. The agnostic position, in debates over dinner, is held up by what boils down to three shields: the first which could be mistaken to be our nation's manifesto - that of 'live and let live', or 'why say something that might offend someone?'; the second which insinuates that the notion of God is one that is necessary for the 'common man' to lead a moral life; and the third - a rather serpentine piece of logic that suggests that since we can't prove that God does not exist, we ought to give both propositions equal credibility.

Of course, each of these are easily countered, so much so that no theologian will ever present them as valid arguments any more: the policy of 'live and let live' is irrelevant to the human endeavor of understanding the world and seeking the Truth; the fact that the greatest philosophers produced by our country - Buddha, Mahavira, Vivekananda and more recently Krishnamurti - were all atheistic in their own ways and yet all appealed to the 'common man', fully aware that the masses could handle the no-god conjecture and; the placement of onus on someone to prove a negative being known to be a specious line of argument - one can never prove that something - Santa Claus or an invisible hippo with a red-bow in your living room - does not exist.

So even though you'd hardly hear anyone claim that they weren't atheistic of Ra, the Egyptian Sun God, or Helios or Thor, we refuse to state that we're atheistic about the current version of God(s). As Dawkins said, "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." We have no qualms denying the existence of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Why do we have trouble stating that we have no god?

It has been argued that the agnostic position then, is one of weakness - that they aren't able to commit to one stand - the theist's or the atheist's - only because they haven't the strength to convince their brains. I argue that our perception of the world, because of the unsure vocabulary we've inherited, has changed. And that, and not intellectual laziness, is the reason that we find the agnostic position attractive.

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Our generation has adopted a language which makes it impossibly difficult to accept the position of an extreme. We are a generation who've been hit by the plague of compromise, of hedging our commitments. We deify the middle-road, and perceive anyone straggling it to be somehow lost.

We place little importance on self-belief, caving in to the whims of the majority. The trump card of tolerance triumphs over the virtue of honesty. We've surrendered our duty to state what we believe to be true, instead wallowing is convenient and what is socially acceptable.

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As you swim in the torrent of words some evenings though, you notice that sometimes, the most common of them catch you by surprise. The courageous beauty of the word 'conviction' stands out strong to me. Repeat it to yourself for a few times, and you'll notice it grow on you, as if just saying it aloud magically empowers you.

It is unfortunate that such a beautiful word is being lost to mean a vile concoction of 'intolerant' and 'uninformed' today. Perhaps future generations will stare at, puzzled at the apparent negative connotation that the word caught on somewhere in the end of the 20th century.

It's sad that that will be our contribution to etymology.