Language. Huh. What is it good for? Why bother? I may as well post a blank page with no title and leave you to make up your own blog. Communication without prejudice. But words, sentences, meaning? Just a swirling magma of unanchored signifiers, an unasked-for dish of congealed opinions that serve to confuse as much as clarify. So what’s the point of this blog then, you may well ask. I do. 

Some years ago there was serious concern in certain linguistic quarters about the imminent disappearance of a language – one of the 6100 or so still around. I say still, because the number is decreasing fairly quickly. I can’t recall the language or even the country, apart from that it was in Latin America. The concern they were concerned about concerned the fact that there were only two people left who knew it – and that they had fallen out and were no longer on speaking terms. If a language has to end, it’s quite a cool way to go. 

We are utterly immersed in language as to almost give the chicken and egg conundrum a run for its money. Is there any other way to navigate life? Indeed there may not be, especially if you start talking about maths as the universal idiom, the language of God. Words and numbers may be the ways in which we belatedly strive to impose order on chaos but therein lies a crucial difference too.

Numbers stand like sentinels of undeniable truth all around us. In the micro and the macro, there they are: countless tiny signposts, indifferent to our insect opinions and the passing of millennia or the collapsing of nebulae. Unlike the language of human interaction, they belong to that echelon beyond science it seems, that simply is. Even so, maths is still but a system of meaningful stepping stones, just organised a bit more rationally than words, but a path to where? And no, there will be no mention of a stairway to anywhere celestial. Similarly, whether or not The Maker turns out to a mathematician is a question that we may visit at some later time – whatever time is.

Words on the other hand, well you couldn’t make them up, except that we have and we do, all the time. They are sonic attempts at photography that were convoluted into hieroglyphs and then into scratchy syntax and clumsy grammar. In our accelerating times, when speed is truly of the essence, there is less and less time for the pointless necessity of grammar. Or spelling. And even apostrophes – but don’t get me started on them.

As we hasten towards the relative the speed of all things graphic once more, do we still care about language as we know it and its extremely strange ways? Well, yes, I think we do. The written word demands a certain rumination and stillness. The very act of construction opens windows in the heart and mind and allows for twinkling playfulness – whether you’re a wordsmith or a turdsmith. The vast photographic archive of words that is the English language, comprised to such a great extent of other fragments of other languages, and born of myriad dark histories, is a joy to those of us with an ear for that kind of thing.

As those who ever had the inestimable pleasure of being in a classroom at the same time as me will know, there is much humour to be found lying around in the tensions and the idiot gaps between language, sound and meaning. I can’t explain why, for instance, I love a poorly-translated menu, but I do. Or a poorly-translated anything. And the further one travels from the UK (remember travelling?) the more wondrous are the linguistic liberties taken.

In Spain you might find lonely chicken or ‘it rotates of smoky’ on the menu but further east… well, god bless ‘em, take your pick if you dare from the veritable smorgasbord of indigestible wreckage of snackage on offer: roasted husband, ice cream in the ass, palace of exploded loin, even ‘whatever’ among much, much else. Who could but a curmudgeon could deny the joy of transcendent, almost deliberate mistranslation or the poetry of ‘Do not disturb: tiny grass dreaming?’ Even a cursory search online uncovers the glorious, endless extent of it all.

Even within one’s own language there are deep swamps, at the bottom of which lie the abandoned wrecks of unnumbered failed attempts to make yourself understood. Pop music, is one of those great, foul repositories where misunderstanding takes root like a demented pond lily, just a listen away and always there for the taking, or rather, the mistaking.

I recently discovered that I am still learning the words to Bohemian Rhapsody, 80 years later or whatever it is. I’ve no idea what I’ve been hearing all these years, but it’s not what’s on the lyric sheet. How, for example, could we explain the satisfaction in mishearing Jefferson Starship’s paen to pork: ‘We built this city on sausage rolls’ or reassigning the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky as ‘the girl with colitis goes by’, or Sister Sledge’s family anthem that asks, ‘just let me staple the vicar’? Ah, that bottomless gap of joy between the written, the spoken and the (wilfully) misheard. 

I can’t really say what it’s like for other languages, but for some unknown reason the English language lends itself to the Shakespearean and the bumbling idiot in equal measure. For good or ill, it’s an absolute treasure house of pointless possibilities for those with a rib-tickling penchant for being utterly silly for no good reason at all. We may be rubbish at an increasing amount of things in this country, but that golden seam of the ridiculous runs through this foolish culture like a stream of bat’s pee in a coal mine. Sadly, we too often don’t know where to draw the line, as evidenced by our choice of politicians and public figures. Not to mention the rest of us. 

So thank heavens for language, that flimsy rope bridge flung across the abyss, which is as much in the service of not understanding as understanding or anything else. Perhaps I should have left the page blank after all. As Michael Caine once enquired: what’s it all about, know what I mean?