Thinking is talking to yourself quietly

• 2 Sep 2010
• language writing thinking
• permalink

(I’m behind on Radiolab, so I’m only getting to their episode “Words” now. I’m about halfway through—please don’t spoil the ending.)

The man without words scares me.

It isn’t just that I’ve known words as long as I can remember and so has every other person I have ever known—though that’s part of it, surely. But the very idea of such a man is repugnant.

Not in a malicious way, mind you: it’s not the person I find myself recoiling from, but the very idea that a person’s mind could operate without language to operate the wheels inside. Language is so very integral to the way I think, indeed to what I mean by thinking, that the idea of anything being meaningfully intelligent without it seems ridiculous. I mean, what does he define as a “thought”? Where does it start? Where does it end?

Oh, of course, he doesn’t define a thought. He doesn’t know that there are words or that they would require definition. I can’t even frame the question without resorting to terms fundamentally based in language.

I especially associate thinking with writing—it’s through writing (usually with a pen, on paper) that I get my best thinking done. (Paper is far more fluid than a computer. This is part of the reason that 750 Words, though brilliant, never panned out for me. I can’t doodle in the margins.)

I take more seriously people who can express themselves well in writing—and less seriously, those who can’t. How do you approach someone who does not understand the concept of a noun?