A Cup is Never Just a Cup
On the meaning of words & who decides
A few announcements:
I will be in Oxford on July 2nd talking about Mother Tongue Tied at Caper bookshop. Please come so I do not have to tweet about how no one came to my reading and then maybe some famous authors will tweet back that this also happened to them once. I will also be having a more intimate book launch event in London (details to come) and if you’d like to come to that, message me!
Over on social media (mostly Instagram but as any author promoting a book I will post across channels), I will be sharing excerpts from the book, reading lists, artists I reference and more all month leading up to my pub date (June 20th!) I will do a round-up here at some point too but if you want to see it “live”, follow me where you consume your social media most!
On the meaning of words:
My daughter often asks me often who “invented” certain words, or how something came to be called what it is called. When this first happened, I tried to have an age-appropriate conversation with her about etymology, the study of the origin of words. But that was not enough for her. “But whooooo decides?” she asked. I started explaining nomenclature, or the choosing of names for things but I was barely making sense to myself, let alone to a child. I was going to ask my son, who is three years older, to explain what he had recently learnt at a workshop at the Linnean Society in hopes that might help. Perhaps if I focused on “the science of classifying and naming the world around us” by referencing Darwin and Carl Linnaeus, I could explain to my daughter why and how we name things.
I also considered telling her about the whole object bias, something I found fascinating and fun when I first read about it during a linguistics class. When children first learn words there is a tendency to interpret words as referring to whole objects rather than parts. But this might require delving into innatism or nativism and as much as I love to throw around Noam Chomsky’s name casually, I didn’t have the energy to go there. I began telling her about how children, when they first learn language, will often overgeneralize. So, perhaps any four-legged animal for a short time is referred to as “doggy”. She looked at me confused. “Let me get back to you on this,” I finally told her.
This all led me on a deep dive, or more of an extended period of thinking and not concluding, on how we organize our worlds with word meanings and experiences. Where does one begin and the other end? Cause and effect, correlation, or causation. But whoooo decides? My daughter’s little voice echoed.
And then I was reminded of a recent episode of one of my favourite podcasts, Radiolab. A nurse named Clare, who also runs a “museum of ordinary things” said this about the common cup:
Like, if you think of the cup, right? It's an object that is made for the human hand. It echoes the shape of how your hand wants to curve around. And it has this incredible affordance of ministering to your thirst, right? Like, you're able to drink things because you have a cup. But it also has this elegant form, right? Like, the interplay of positive and negative space, and then, you know, you think, "Okay, drinking out of a cup. How consequential is that?" But, you know, I work in an intensive care unit in this little regional hospital in Vermont and, you know, I can't tell you, like, for someone who swallowing has been impossible or not allowed, you know, to finally—like, the moment that they can grip a cup and take a drink is a profound experience and, like, a really important moment.
How consequential is any object when it cannot be used in the way it is intended to be used because of circumstances beyond someone’s control? After hearing Clare, I thought, who the fuck cares what a cup is called and who decided when there are people in the world who cannot use one to quench their thirst? Of course I care, I mean I really care about words because words and language are important, but I care more about things, actions, people, every-day lives that may seem inconsequential until we can no longer have them, do them, be around them. Labels are not meanings. Perhaps that is the answer to who decides: We all do.