[from my myspace] On the Names of Things

[intro]
I used myspace.com blogs for the past few years for my randomly-spaced blogging. Therefore, I am jumpstarting my blog here with most of those blogs.
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Original posting: Sunday, February 19, 2006, 6:15 PM
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Haven't you ever wondered why things are named the things they are named? Why is an orange an orange? Where does the troposphere became the stratosphere? If I own property, how far up or down do I own it? Why does the definition of a tree not include the ground it touches? Where does the ceiling become the floor of the level above? When does red become not red enough to be still called red? Who decided a second would last as long as it does?

These questions, and many many many others, form the foundation of this Rant sub-topic-ed "On the Names of Things."

If you've read the book Frindle by Andrew Clements (great book; if you haven't read it, READ IT!!!), you'll learn--or just simply be re-reminded--that it is society that prescribes words to objects. If we all just suddenly decided that the leaves of a tree are not actually part of the tree but are instead separate entities that will be renamed "treelings," then, by god, they will be called "treelings" from now on! Of course, there might be opponents in the botany field, but they're easily suppressible!

Also, if society wanted to differentiate between the left side and the right side of a pen, then new names for each part can be concocted and then adopted by society. The left side can be called "mogheniny" and the right, "gasterin," and if everyone uses such words for the respective sides, new words for new parts have been created!

I guess we could go faaaar back into the beginnings of human culture thousands upon thousands of years back and somehow elicit the rough origins of current words from the grunts of early humankind. Then, we could follow the word's evolution through human history and observe how an apple or a cloud came to be called their respective names.

Today, people take for granted the language(s) in which we all communicate in. We just assume that people had to communicate somehow and the local grunts or whatever people used in the stone ages just got too regionalized that a pervasive language somehow evolved. We also assume that the origin of current languages was just some old language such as Latin and leave it at that. But where did Latin come from?? [I use "We assume" as a big generalization.]

Hm, I haven't really revealed a portion of my mind through this Rant. I've just laid out observations and such to get some noggins cranking. I'll crash (a.k.a. end) this train of thought with a random theory I'll make up to explain the origin of language or words.

A long, long time ago, homo sapiens were just like any other species in nature. So how did we separate ourselves intellectually from the rest? What I'm about to say may seem like a tangent, but it relates; don't worry. Two years ago or so, I watched this Discovery Channel Special about Evolution. In the dawn of earth life, there were many different Mother species: the Mother of today's mollusks, the Mother of today's insects, the Mother of today's invertebrates, etc. The et cetera Mothers died in the competition for survival, while the other three became the main players for world domination (not in the politcal sense, of course).

Being that this was the beginning of life, this all occurred in the water. Mollusks and insects had the edge (I forgot why), so how did puny invertebrates survive? They used a now-basic survival method of HIDING in the sand at the bottom of the ocean. Even as early as, well, as early as life can go, invertebrates already had some intellect. It could already be observed that invertebrates would evolve to become some sort of intellectual superior to the others.

Now, back to languages and words. Because we people began as the intellectual superior, we had to evolve with this trait if we wanted to survive evolution-ally and competitively. Insects are pretty warlike and territorial and biological. They communicate with excreted chemicals or something and survive from other biological methods. Mollusks... um, they survived by shooting ink and escaping or having a seashell as protectiong or something. Invertebrates, we evolved hand-in-hand with intellect.

Therefore, it is no wonder that we developed our means of communication in the intellectual way of verbal words. Hm, I don't think I ended up theorizing about what I wanted to theorize about. Oh well.

Since this Rant is getting rather lengthy, I shall end it here, even though so much more could be said. I hope I've made everyone think. Sorry that all the same-colored words look so daunting. If you made to the end, I congratulate you ten-fold.