On Feeling a Word, Rather than Reading It

In recent months I came to associate a very commonly used pronoun with a certain person. Gradually, the word came to depict the set of feelings I had for her. Over time, a particularly interesting thing happened – the word transcended her and became the feeling itself. And then one day, when I was reading an article, I came across that pronoun and felt, for lack of a better term, a mesmerising cognitive dissonance. My brain’s logical side was interpreting the dictionary definition of the word while, simultaneously, its emotive side was feeling all that I had come to associate with that word and, consequently, her.

I wasn’t really reading the word, but feeling it. I was not imagining what the word represented, but actually feeling what it stood for.

The emergence of this sensation is radically different from when a word conjures up some image in your head, a picture in the Wittgensteinian sense of corresponding to some external entity, like how the word “chair” corresponds to “an object that, mostly, has four legs and is able to provide seating to one person” – where the image of such a chair comes up in our mind.

No, this is very different kind of sensation – a particular mix of feelings rise within you, and it’s not that you feel that the word represents those feelings, but, rather, that the word is that feeling. It would be like reading the word “pain” and actually feeling pain, whether physical or emotional, rather than imagining what pain is like or what are its components.

What do I mean by “feeling” a word?

The visual cue of that word makes me feel a certain way, not by association or by acting as a medium to something which is the actual cause of that feeling; but as the very feeling itself without the need of any intermediary. In this process, somewhat paradoxically, the visual form of the word has transcended the very entity it was meant to refer to, and has become that entity itself; the experience of this appropriation of identity is peculiar in itself; but trying to convey what it feels like is even trickier.

Let us take a step back.

When we first meet someone, we observe them even before we come to assign any tag to them, like a name. This experience cannot be quantified, for human interactions flow like a wave – they are continuous, imbued with countless subtle variations in their flow; and are multi-layered events with varying degrees of depth.

And then we get to know their name. What does this do?

The word (a name in this case), whether in its written form or in the sound that it creates when spoken, is just a symbol which has two different modes of cummunication, but both the modes refer or correspond to the same entity – that person.

What exactly is the symbol doing? It is basically encapsulating a range of impressions and maps that set of impressions on to itself. Over time, we keep adding more impressions to that set but the word remains the same, and that is how the idea of that person in our minds comes to change over time – the name, akin to a tag, serves as the immutable point of reference.

But what exactly is a name? I think before we even try to answer that question, we must answer an even simpler question – what is a word?

Let us start with an example – the word “rose”.

Notice two important things.

Firstly, a word (whether written by hand or printed on a paper) is essentially just a specific combination of lines and curves – only a well-choreographed movement of our pen can give rise to this particular word and it will make sense only as long as the form it takes is within a certain error margin. If you were to, for example, accidentally extend the “o” a bit downwards, the word will become gibberish – it will either become “rpse” or “rqse”, both of which make no sense.

Secondly, a “word” derives its meaning from a language. The set of lines and curves that exist in the visual structure of the word “rose” carries meaning only in the context of English, and certain other related languages that are in the same language family.

Essentially, a language constrains the set of combinations of lines and curves that will be meaningful for the people who know that language. The symbol “chemise” is not a word and is, hence, meaningless in the English language, but it is a word with a well-defined meaning in French – “shirt”.

From among the lexical categories (or parts of speech) of any language, one specific category is particularly interesting from our present perspective – nouns. The word “noun” comes from the Latin word “nomen”, which literally means “name”.

So what is a name? A name is any such combination of lines and curves, a symbol, that refers to some object or concept that exists out there in our shared world. “Rose” is the name of a particular flower, “India” the name of a particular place and so on. Both of these are also nouns.

Notice that technically, not all names are words. Every language has a dictionary, which is nothing but the set of legitimate words of that language. This does not have to be a physical dictionary, but could even be an “in-principle dictionary”. When exactly is a word added to the dictionary? Only when the usage of that word has reached a certain level of widespread use – which is why you may not find the nickname you have given to your cat in a dictionary, unless you named it after something that was already there in the first place.

Now, let us consider a random combination of lines and curves that is not a word in our language – “bfejqgfe”. This symbol is meaningless; it is not a name, and is definitely not a word. The reason I want to start with such an example here, unlike what I had actually personally experienced, is to prevent any already existing meanings of the symbol, if any, to form the basis upon which our subsequent understanding of the symbol grows.

Let us imagine two situations.

In the first case, we assign this symbol as a name to a person. We form a link between a static visual symbol and a dynamic set of qualities that exist in an object, the person, who is out there in the physical world. As we interact with that person, we keep adding, to the initial set of first impressions, bits and pieces of details, opinions, observations, feelings, judgements, biases and a whole range of subjective responses to the idea of that person, and then whenever we see the symbol “bfejqgfe” this person springs up in our imagination with all her traits.

Now let’s imagine another situation. What if, instead, we assign this symbol as a name to a feeling that we have? And what if, over time, we start adding certain other shades of feelings to that same name? What are the implications?

Feelings are inner states of being and do not have a visual form – when we feel a certain way, there is no image that comes up in our minds. So what will happen when I see the symbol “bfejqgfe” somewhere?

Let us consider a word like “car”. I have known this word since I was a child. I did not create this word, so I imbibed its meaning from the different instances in which I was exposed to this word around me – from the newspapers, television, relatives and friends talking about it and so on. In the case of such pre-existing words, I am a part of a bigger set of people all of whom have common knowledge about the word and its concept. Consequently, whenever any member of that set uses that word, the corresponding concepts flood in my brain and I am able to understand what he or she is saying. Even if I read a relatively complex statement about cars in a newspaper, for example “barring the three new models launched last week, this car has the fastest acceleration among all the sedans currently in production in India”, I am able to make sense of what is being said since I share a common undestanding of this concept with a lot of other people.

Here is the interesting part – this particular chain of events leading to a shared understanding will not happen when it comes to words I have created.

Why?

When I created the word “bfejqgfe”, only I was aware of its existence. I had associated this word with a particular feeling of mine. So, it is not possible for anyone else to use that word unless two conditions are fulfilled. First, I will have to convey this word to someone else and second, they will have to understand what exactly I mean by this word. Naturally, the first one will hardly take a few seconds, but accomplishing the second one can be tricky as we will ourselves have to have a clear idea of the set of feelings that we have included in the concept. However, since in this piece my focus is more on our internal experience of a particular word that has risen subject to a specific set of circumstances, I shall limit my consideration to the time in which the word is not mature enough to be properly communicated to other people.

So, since only I am aware of that word, all the instances of that word in the outer physical world (whether written or aural) are my own creation.

Put simply, it is not possible for me to come across novel usages of this word where I could put to use my own understanding of the word. All I will ever come across are my own usages of the word, and since I will always be knowing the context of that particular usage, there will be no spontaneous growth in the concept of that idea, unless I deliberately decide to add something to it.

When I had read the news about the fastest sedan in the newspaper, it is possible that I was encountering the word “sedan” for the first time. I would have subsequently referred a dictionary to understand what the word meant, and then coalesced that idea to my current understanding of cars. In other words, my concept of a “car” developed due to uncontrolled input from the external world and it was moulded by the ideas of someone else.

This spontaneous growth of a mental concept is not possible in the case of a word I have created – a word like “bfejqgfe”. This word can grow if and only if I deliberately decide to change its concept and what all it should imbibe.

I am in control of what it means. I can give this word any meaning I want, add to it any feelings I may have.

I can imprint this word with signatures of my experience of both the external physical world, and the internal world of emotions, feelings and moods.

In essence, through this private emotional signature, I can create a permanent bookmark for certain feelings of mine. If I use an already existing word, however, then through such cognitive dissonances as I mentioned in the beginning, I allow the possibility of the feelings to get eroded away. Not so when I use a word that I have created.

Interestingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein has given a critique of such “private language”, showing that it cannot exist. Essentially, his argument goes, that since there is no dictionary for such a private language, how can we ever be sure that we are referring to the same concepts (feelings in our case) when we consider the private word across different instances of time.

I hope I can wade into those waters some day, but for today, I’ll let him have the last laugh.