Re: Illusionary References

Thanks, Zoe! Neat.

Your comments triggered me into wondering how it is, then, that we evolve the meanings of the words within ourselves… and the answer I got back (prompted by your post) was stories. We are creatures of story. It is the stories we have around the word love that define love for us. Likewise for every deep, meaningful word. The stories are how we define he meaning…. of everything.

And that helps me explain why movies are so extremely popular in our culture: they are the common stories, the instruments that define the moods and meanings as precisely as they can be (still riddled with interpretation on each individual’s end, but still more precision that just using a single word) because a movie-story gives context to the mood and words.

For example, when I say, Brenda loves Jerry like Sally loves Harry in “like in When Harry Met Sally”, anyone who has seen the movie knows exactly what I mean. Well, “exactly” to a higher precision than if I just said, “Oh, yes, Brenda loves Jerry.”

So these movie-stories are powerful and valuable cultural links, they are like our common meanings and communication-relationship vocabularies that carry startling precision. Maybe not precision-per-letter, it may take me dozens of words to specify a mood/message/meaning from a movie as opposed to using a single word like “love”, but the precision in communication of the context and subtlety and meaning are great.

Which leads me to think of that episode of Star Trek where the alien race only spoke in story references, not verbs and nouns… “In Jerico (sp?), when the walls fell down,” they’d say to describe their view, the roles expected, and the actions in play in the situation.

Well, I don’t think we need to go quite that far in our adaptation of language for precision… hee hee