Yes.........words. The art of communicating is at the heart of our progression, it is what cultivates our movements and flows towards inevitable change. Yet like anything that has any importance or value to it whatsoever the flaws it upholds are bigger than most.
Words are tragically defeatist. They combat on a plane much higher than most people feel comfortable engaging in, but their height makes their powers crumble. They weaken, words cannot hold together the ways we would like them to.
For instance, a word like CHARMING standing alone in bold is merely an adjective, and carries a strong complimentary appeal. But with depth and much concentration on diction, one begins to wonder why not ENIGMATIC, why not HANDSOME, why not GLORIOUS. Simple words with simple meanings but when exposed in a comparative context become rather hierarchical, some have mystical connotations, others aesthetic ones, some are simply more complimentary.
Not that our understanding of language solely derives from a comparative process, sometimes words emerge solely from the context in which they are used, BLOG for instance is one of those words. This idea I borrow from David Foster Wallace's "Wiggle Room":
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace
In this short story he exposes incite on the words BORED and INTERESTING. His etymological approach indicates that INTERESTING derived its meaning in contrast to BORED, which derived its meaning out of necessitated context in which people actually needed a word to describe the feelings they were having given their circumstances. Thus the two meanings are grounded in each other, the one's meaning necessitated by the existence of the others meaning.
Too Cool! It is fascinating to me to think that the words we use daily carry in them such weight, but that their true meaning does not exist, as the truth behind words is always and forever subject to perception, comparison, context, and CREATION.
That words can function in such a way, that they can formulate an intricate web of interdependency, like humans, that words can then mean so little and have such great depth whilst having no truth to that depth at all makes them fascinating.
Some would argue the opposite, that words do carry truth, I am not one of those who upholds such a belief, not to say that truth doesn't exits, (here we are only talking about the truth behind words). I would be interested in knowing how words carry meanings that have a true value to them. Please do respond!
Anyways, this is all going somewhere very important:
IMAGINE now that you are a speaker of several language, how does this convoluted the whole mess of speaking and are the two language processes isolated from one another in the mind. I speak Arabic, but do not write and read proficiently enough to be able to say that I think in that grammar. The grammar or logic that shapes my thinking is very much an English one, and this is where Beirutification becomes a continual challenge, as you see the streets of Beirut work against the grammatalogy, against the grain of thought that I am predisposed to engage within. Of course no mind solely functions on one set of rules, but the English mindset does gravely influence the whole of my being as a person.
Thus the term Beirutification derives from the fact that Beirut gradually and residually leaves marks on my mindset that challenge the very functioning of my being at all times. This challenge makes being Lebanese difficult, but even more worth the effort.
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