Blah Blah….Blah?

As I have thought about this project for over a month now, I’ve come across different topics, under my main topic of social interaction, that I really want to research into and ask around about. To start things off, I wanted to start at the very basics of all interaction, Language. Language is a funny thing in that it is completely intangible and can signify different things all at once depending on, for example, the spelling, how it’s said, who is saying it, and when it is said.

Have you ever been told a joke and you just didn’t get it? It’s not that you don’t understand the words that have been said to you, but it is as if there is something hidden in there that you didn’t catch onto, or don’t have the background information on in order to understand.

I frequently find myself understanding what is being said to me, or what the visuals mean, but not –really- understanding. Obviously, a bright light shining out of a box means that there is a surprising and long sought-after object inside. However, there seems to be this hidden connotation or purpose behind everything that I still don’t understand and most of my friends still give me strange looks when I ask why something is said or portrayed the way it is. I mean really, the commercial was about a box that arrived from something you ordered online. I expect it to arrive.. apparently Argentine’s love it when things arrive? I don’t know.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and draw from one of my management classes and say: Language is virtual, it apparently exists, but it is not real. It has the virtue to produce an effect, an effect that exists only in your mind.

Natural language is what you have been learning since you were born, whether that is English, Spanish, French, or whatever else. It is extremely ambiguous and it has been noted that it is interesting how a simple word has a distinct meaning is distinct environments and in different circumstances. It also includes profession slang or environmental slang such as: fiscal responsibility, basal ganglia, homeskillet, po po, and cross-sectional inequality.

Nominal language are the words themselves as well as codes

Formal language involves processes, logic, mathematics, and sciences.

Now, as I’ve slowly discovered this world, or lack of real world, of language, I’ve noticed just how much I don’t pick up on with my life here. Even in my own language I don’t always truly understand the meaning behind everything. I’m guilty of loading up Dictionary.com or the Urban Dictionary, or simply having to ask “what does that even mean?” On that note, it isn’t surprising that here in Argentina, their reactions in society, whether through interaction with friends or seeing a commercial (that I thought was rather lame), are going to be different than what I would normally expect. It’s going to take me a lot of work to try and figure out something that I can’t analyze, put into a machine and say “calculate!” and that changes with each person.

On a final note, just to give you an idea of how global this really is and not exclusive to my experience in South America, I have an example from the bible. I am by no means religious or trying to push any religious views on anyone, it’s just a simple story that clarified for me the point I wanted to get across. Remember, it’s just language that doesn’t really mean anything anyways!

“ Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, “if as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” Genesis 11, 1-9

By the way, all websites used to obtain the information in this post are available for further viewing on the main page, but are also available under the Category “Compilations“.
Until next post!