Language is Nothing if it Means Nothing
BY Ann Torres
“¡Ay, que linda! My princess is here!” My grandmother stands at the top of the stairs to her apartment, arms wide open as the smell of her chicken and rice and my aunt’s cigarette smoke waft towards me at the bottom. “Hi, Gramma!” I answer as I run up to meet her.
Every time I went to visit her, Gramma would greet me with “¡Ay, que linda!” and a hug. Then she’d hold me at arm’s length and look me up and down and say it again. I never knew what it meant. My grandmother came from Puerto Rico to New York when she was ten years old and was forced to learn English in school. When she had children and grandchildren of her own, she made an effort to speak almost exclusively in English so that they were prepared to interact in the outside world. That short exclamation was some of the only Spanish I ever heard her speak. I never had the occasion to learn the language beyond that sentence, and honestly never felt the need to. It never occurred to me that I didn’t know what she was saying to me. Even though I didn’t necessarily understand the words, I knew what they meant. They were love and affection, and when she said them to me, those words felt as though they belonged to me as much as my name did.
Language is powerful because it is how we connect with each other, not strictly by the definitions of our words, but by the intention behind them. Language is formulaic. There are grammar rules: necessary punctuations, past and future tenses, nouns and verbs with correct definitions. When spoken, there is proper pronunciation, when signed, there are proper gestures, and when written, there are proper spellings. There is an objectively wrong, or improper, way to speak or write a language, and those are the instances where someone completely disregards that formula.
Society has historically placed an extraordinary emphasis on proper language usage, to the point where people who use language improperly are often at an inherent social disadvantage when they go out into the world. Language usage is commonly seen as an indicator of a person’s intelligence or level of education. If someone speaks poorly, assumptions are made. If confronted in a social setting with someone who is not a fluent or native English speaker and given no other indicators of that person’s background or skillset, that person is immediately put into a box. There is a belief that because I am more familiar with the language than this person is, I know more than they do or have some advantage over them. There is immediately a presumed inequality between me and that other person, feeding into commonly held stereotypes and misconceptions. These assumptions can be made even between citizens of the same country with the same linguistic background. Different accents are associated with different regions of the country, each region with their own stereotypes. Someone with that accent is instantly associated with the stereotypes of that region. In professional settings, as well, those who are good public speakers and writers are more likely to impress in a job interview than those candidates who are not. Simply put, language usage has immediate implications for how people are perceived be the societies they are in.
And yet simultaneously, our society places an extraordinary emphasis on intent. In criminal court, intent is what separates first-degree murder from self-defense. “Intent” is what changes a statement like “she wears glasses” from a statement of fact to bullying. “Intent” is a parent’s basis for correcting their child’s mistakes. We base morality in our society on what someone “meant,” not how well they committed their crime or structured their sentence. I was scrolling through the internet one day when I saw a post about an obituary that was supposedly generated by a computer. It was posted as a joke because what was generated was almost nonsense. It read: “She had a sweet heart and married her high school. She loved having hobbies and helping her sons to be disadvantaged youths. She had no horses but thought she did…The funeral will be held in 1977 at heaven. In lieu of flowers, send Brenda more life” (Yeoh). The obituary is hilariously bad, not because its grammatical structure is wrong, but because it means nothing. It is nonsensical because no mother would love helping her children to be “disadvantaged youths,” and because you can’t just send a dead person more life. Regardless of how real it is, the post highlights the fact that it’s the meaning of our language that matters. Proper language usage is not all that language is. This would never be a real obituary because it says nothing about the person it was written for, even if the nouns and verbs were right and fancy words were used.
Intent is even how we teach people to learn a language. We all had moments when we were little when we were reading a book or listening to an adult talk, and they used a word that we didn’t know the definition of. The first thing a teacher would say is to think about “context clues.” We work backwards to derive the definition of a word based on the meaning of the rest of the sentence. If a language was only a structural formula, you wouldn’t be able to derive anything from a sentence if a critical piece of it, even a single word, was missing.
Our current technology-based culture has in some ways led to the deemphasis of proper language usage. Abbreviations have replaced popular phrases when we’re texting. Ending sentences with periods or starting them with capital letters are practically nonexistent habits for people. And yet even without these conventions of language, one thing has become clearer than ever: intentions still must be demonstrated. Emojis are the new punctuation. We insert a crying emoji after an “lmfao” to make a distinction between sarcasm and genuine laughter. We send hearts and kisses after “ily.” We have even begun using images of things that should mean nothing (i.e., the eggplant) to indicate an underlying intention in a quick, insignificant message. If words themselves were the beginning and end of language, we wouldn’t value these other indicators or need them to clarify what we’re saying to each other.
Language is nothing if it means nothing. Even though there is some level of import associated with proper language usage in society, the improper use of language does not altogether negate its value. To define language based on a rubric of sophistication rather than on whether or not it communicates something is a disservice to language’s true function. When my grandmother said, “¡Ay, que linda!” over and over again, the fact that I couldn’t define each sound or spell it out didn’t matter. I understood that it meant that she was telling me she loved me. Our exchange was the purest example of what true language is. Language is expression; once something is truly expressed, language has accomplished its purpose.
Today, my grandmother suffers from severe dementia. The diagnosis was a difficult thing to wrestle with because with it came the idea that there would be a point when I wouldn’t be her princess anymore– I’d just be a stranger. I got my last “¡Ay, que linda!” years ago now. Yet as sad as that is, the saddest part is that my grandmother’s words stopped meaning anything. Our last conversation was about putting milk in salad. I can chuckle at that conversation much the same way I can chuckle at that computer-generated obituary, acknowledging that it is done in perfect, proper English and Spanish with some crucial flaws in logic. But that conversation struck me in a way I didn’t expect. I realized that she can’t talk to me anymore; she can only talk at me. Her words don’t really mean anything. My grandmother is here. I can hug her. She can still speak to me perfectly, and I can hear her voice. Yet, as much as I try to see those things as a gift, there is part of me that struggles to find the good. The communication and understanding that existed between just a few years ago are barely visible now. Her language has ceased to be expression.
My grandmother is not dead. But that part of me that struggles to find the good wonders if a lack of true language, meaningful language, is a social death even if it is not a physical one.
“¡Ay, que linda!” – Oh, how pretty.
Works Cited
Yeoh, B. “Bot obituary.” Then Do Better. 11 Sep. 2021. https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2021/9/11/bot-obituary.
About the Author
Ann Torres is a student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center from Queens, New York. Her primary focus is combining philosophy and the arts to create work that connects with audiences on a human level. She thoroughly enjoys writing of all kinds and intends to pursue a career in writing in the future.