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Love Letter About Humanity's Ultimate Melting Pot
Language is something that can’t be quantified, isn’t something that can be turned singular, or manipulated without the erosion of years and a thousand new words and cultures born in the spaces between point A and B. Language is a judgement. Our synonyms and our antonyms are reflections, our homophones and definitions are how we look in the mirror, how we see the connections our generational brains make, the lines we draw in the sand to settle in the boundaries of our society. When thys and thous turn to whos and whats we transform our ideas, our values, our lives, and when we create slang that becomes definitions, when we pick apart bits of old and dead languages and smooth them over with our own pronunciations and letters and definitions, we set the past into the future and present, we tie a string with a can at each end and shout to each other across the halls of time.
Words can birth cuts on our skin and mind, can scar our hearts, can make us taste anger or love, fear or hate. Words can make us into new people, with faces we don’t even recognize. Words can sear themselves into our ribcages and we can carry their mark forever. The phonics that our haphazard alphabet creates are ever changing and our spelling deteriorates over time, but language, words, are born anew every time we utter them, so thys and whous and wherefore art thous still hold meaning, but they’ve faded into ancestral memory, and language is born again, trading grammar and meanings all the time so that what meant one thing means another in a thousand years.
Our sentence structure grows aged more faster than our dictionary does, decaying over time as it tries to keep its nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and prepositions all in one place, as it tries to to manufacture stories with the words all in the same place it decays, slowly being born anew as it reinvents itself to accommodate a brighter, darker culture full of anger and tranquility, love and war, caresses and fists, insults and compliments. As it compensates, it degrades. We lose the place of words in our novels and shows and movies and poems as we try to piece them together with fractured knowledge and a new world mindset that cares not for the old way. So as a snake, we shed the skin of the past and adorn a new layer to survive the next heat wave full of phonics and letters and grammar and pronunciations.
The love story of language and culture is a hard one to bear, full of breakups and makeups and affairs and betrayals and new words of love upon lips as they evolve and shape from grunts murmured over firelight to the echoing cascading oratory that fills the halls of a marble palace and are screeched at a night sky that is redefined and reimagined and analyzed and categorized. It transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly on an annual basis, its wings flashing blue then red then gold then green as its phonics and grammar and alphabet begins anew and the cycle never ends, as it breathes life into pages with the words Plato and Macbeth and Utopia and Austen dancing across, into songs that echo with strings and brass and haunting words that speak to the soul. Love is woven with care and with blood into every crevice of language, seeping into it like cracks in concrete, uniting it in matrimony with our way of life, our stories, our tears, our feelings.
Words are serene in their inevitability, the circles they make in our history, the patterns they form in our mouths. They make sense of chaos, find ways to express the unidentifiable. They dream up a thousand ways to say the same thing, they reflect the path of our world and its customs through its births and deaths that are continuous and monotonous. Words grace our lips and fill papyrus and paper, creating our world and transfixing it and influencing it and mirroring it so that I cannot breathe without it on my mind.
