reflecting on language

i find myself thinking a lot about language this week. language gets a lot of abuse from a lot of different angles. but it is especially abused by non-native speakers, who tend to assign new meanings to words that already had a perfectly good meaning assigned to them already. and if you happened to know that original meaning, you can be left feeling mightily confused. especially if the new meaning has no apparent connection to the original, ostensibly real, one.

but i say ostensibly real, because that's the thing about language - it's pretty arbitrary. why chair means chair and not table is because we've all more or less agreed upon that. but the chair i see in my head when you say chair and the chair you see in your head may be quite different. my generic chair is a lot like this one:



but, because of the way language functions, we more or less agree that a chair is something you can sit on and then there are variations from there and so we all understand the gist of it when we say "chair."

and i don't just mean neologisms, where someone makes up an entirely new word - like sustainovation (a combination of sustainability and innovation), but what if the meaning given to a word, like say, "quota," is very different from any you've experienced. to me a quota is a quantative amount that one tries to meet. it is not another name for your vacation days. so if you encounter quota in the sense of vacation days, you are left feeling a bit bewildered. because it is bewildering to be reading along in what is ostensibly your language and suddenly you don't understand the meaning, even tho' you understand the words.

it seems that it's worse in written language than in spoken. if someone said "quota" to you to mean vacation days, you would, through expression and body language, communicate that you didn't quite get that word, or you could directly ask. there would be more understanding possible in spoken language than there is in the written word, where you are left to suss out the meaning for yourself from the context.

i suspect that entering a workplace populated by 50-some different nationalities, where the shared language is english, i'm going to be encountering lots of these little gems. of course, i've been working with non-native speakers of english for more than a decade now, so i'm rather used to it, but it seems it will be even more marked this time, with the addition of german into the mix as the predominant other language.

adding to that the fact that companies, especially very large ones, have a tendency to create their own internal language, i think this is going to be an exciting linguistic ride.