This is a story from over two decades ago when a passionate environmentalist friend from New Zealand, who lived as I also did in the northern Thai town of Chiang Mai, told me about a project he had embarked up.
He wanted to create a dictionary of ecological terms targeting neo-literate youth from ethnic groups living along the Thai-Burma border among whom he worked and whose knowledge of English was elementary.
An applaudable mission of course but he went further in his ambition – to define every entry in the dictionary with words so simple that they would need no further explanation at all. Essentially, the user of this very special dictionary would grasp the meaning of every term by just reading the text written alongside, without having to check any other references.
I told him, he had set himself an impossible goal. There would always be some words used in any explanation that would definitely require further clarification and the clarification itself would need yet newer words and so on in an infinite chain of sorts.
What my friend failed to grasp at the time (he finally settled for a normal dictionary!) was that most words in any language acquire meaning only when corelated with lived experiences. Some words will always be incomprehensible if one has never been part of the phenomenon they represent.
For example, no amount of verbally warning a child to avoid touching a flame because it is hot will convey the meaning of ‘hot’ until it actually burns its hand. Once painfully experienced, the term ‘hot’ will go on to become a solid brick in the foundation of key words upon which the child’s entire repertoire of language and meanings can be built.
In fact, I have come to believe, that the English term ‘understanding’ literally means to ‘stand under’ something – whether it is love, pain, pleasure or sorrow. You ‘understand’ truly only when it falls upon your head, with all its weight, as benevolence or disaster. If an image is worth a thousand words then a real moment of joy or suffering is the equivalent of a million lectures. A walk in the park will tell you more about the world than all the Google searches possible.
I have been thinking of my friend in Chiang Mai and his dictionary project and the link between meaning and experience recently because I no longer comprehend many terms that made perfect sense to me not too long ago. At least not the way they are used these days.
And I am talking about not just somewhat complex terms like ‘democracy’, ‘secularism’ or ‘justice’ but also straightforward ones like ‘human rights’, ‘peace’ or even plain, common ‘decency’.
Normally, no one really bothers to examine regularly used words whose meaning is taken to be ‘obvious’. The need to rethink arises only when, due to any reason, meanings shape shift and get tossed around without any definite coordinates – like a flailing scrap of paper in a dust devil.
And that’s exactly the kind of world we live in now – when not just meanings but reality itself is being tossed about to a point where it is often just upside down. Is it surprising that ‘understanding’ of even familiar terms has become difficult when everything is either ‘up in the air’ or ‘standing upon its head’?
What was ‘good’ in the past is now ‘bad’, ‘lies’ have become the ‘truth’ and the ‘ugly’ designated ‘beautiful’. The ultra-rich are now supposed to be champions of the working class and the most regressive characters around dubbed as ‘radicals’ and ‘revolutionaries’.
Elected representatives, who are supposed to be ‘servants of the people’ have now become their ‘masters’. The concept of ‘democracy’ has been hollowed out to a point where a kleptocratic politician who, once in a while, throws crumbs to the masses he has pauperized is painted a ‘benevolent ruler’. We indeed live in an era when every standard dictionary is bleeding meaning as fast as data on a poor man’s prepaid sim card.
So, how do we begin to reclaim the meanings of all these terms truer to their original intent? Is it possible or even desirable to return to the ‘wonderful’ past, which for all its allure when compared to current realities was deeply flawed too? Should we remain steadfast and cling on to our deeply cherished interpretation of these terms, irrespective of how unrecognizably the language itself has transformed today? Is it possible to educate or persuade those who have deliberately shut their eyes and ears while leaving only their tongues unfettered?
I think, none of the above. Instead if, as I have argued earlier, meaning emerges from lived experience then the best strategy seems to be to recreate all those experiences which can bring the meanings we want alive once again. This calls for hard action, not lamentation and determined intervention, not just interpretation.
If the world is standing on its head then it obviously needs some physical effort to set it up on its feet again. Despite the enormous power of propaganda in our times analysis alone is never going to be sufficient to change anything. Software does not exist on its own without the hardware to host it.
What we need are acts of solidarity, mobilization, organization building, resistance. Interventions that challenge injustice, authoritarianism, discrimination and exploitation. No space is too small, no target too insignificant, no issue less important than the other – nobody too weak to act or intervene according to their context or ability.
Milan Kundera was of course right when he said, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. I would add my own twist to this famous quote and say, ‘the struggle against power is the struggle of our dictionaries against incomprehension’.
And for the explanations in our dictionaries to ring true they cannot be printed in normal ways anymore. They will need the ink to blend with the flowing blood, sweat and tears of popular struggles to create the meaningful world we so desire.
Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health worker. He can be reached at [email protected]
