This is the first question I ask. There’s usually silence. A tumbleweed rolls across the floor. Somewhere in the distance a lone coyote howls. The silence kills me. Not one brave hand. First-day nerves, I think. I haven’t just fallen into a Sergio Leone western. I inevitably send around a plain envelope so they can offer their definitions on slips of paper. I feel like I’m collecting teeth. I think it’s only polite that you do the same. No, I don’t want you to collect teeth. I want you to tell me what language is. Go on, I’m listening.
Task – Complete the sentence: Language is …
Now, imagine you’re folding the slip of paper and placing it in my envelope. We’ll get to the ‘answer’ in a moment but we first need to have a think about what I’ve just done. Did you notice what I was doing?
I just sent you a message from the past. It’s not a recording of what’s happening to me right now but the subjective memory of a moment I experienced prior to writing this. I’m almost acting as a relay for a moment in my past in an attempt to express an idea to you, a person in some unknown future. For all I know this future moment – the moment when you read this chapter – could be years, even decades, from when I wrote it. I will never know if my idea has been communicated but I can at least be sure that I expressed it. I’m addressing you directly though, in the present tense. I’m making this happen now. I’ve either mastered space and time, or there’s something both peculiar and amazing about this thing we call language. It’s almost magical, and we might label much of that magic as metaphor. Some would say that metaphor characterizes how we think and communicate. I drew upon the domain of the spaghetti western with its tumbleweeds and howling coyotes to illustrate the barren wasteland which is that first lecture when everyone is still acclimatizing. I also mentioned collecting teeth. It would literally be quite sinister if it was true, but we accept that this is a metaphor that signifies a difficult task. (Or perhaps you imagined me as the tooth fairy?)