Language is meaningless

The title of this essay isn’t totally accurate. But it reflects how I feel at the moment, and I figured a title like that might be attention-grabbing. A more accurate title would be “Language is arbitrary” or “Language is circular.” Those statements aren’t news to English majors, readers of Saussure, or thoughtful people in general. We all know language is largely just built on itself. But the truth of this was brought home to me last night in especially vivid light.

I was tutoring my Mexican lady, and as usual we were going over vocabulary questions she had from the reading she had done since our last meeting. She speaks English pretty competently, and according to a test she took with the literacy council, she reads it at an eighth-grade level (whatever that means). Last night, though, her questions were baffling me.

Take the previous sentence. “Though” was one of her questions. She had come across it in her reading, and she tried to look it up herself. The dictionary told her it was both a conjunction and an adverb. I had never known that. I often pull out the dictionary when tutoring. It can be helpful for articulating definitions of words we use so often that we never think about them. Not so in this case:

though, conj. in spite of the fact that.

Well, okay, that’s a pretty good definition, but what about “in spite of?” What does that mean, when you really think about it? I flipped back 51 pages to see what I might find under “spite.” For a second, it looked like the dictionary was going to do me a double favor by defining the whole expression:

—Idiom. in spite of, notwithstanding; despite.

Jesus. How the hell are you going to explain “notwithstanding” to an ESL student? It’s not quite the same as teaching a word like “chair,” where you get to just point at the fucking thing. 

I realized that a dictionary isn’t useful until you finally land on a definition consisting entirely of words the reader knows. If you were especially unlucky, your student might ask about some Word of Infinite Regress that would have you flipping back and forth through the dictionary for the rest of your life.

I can’t recall exactly how I ended up explaining “though.” I think it involved a fair amount of weird gesturing. And examples, those always help. If you give enough context, people can pretty well intuit the meaning of a word even without a comprehensible definition. I think my explanation came through, more or less, but it was completely exhausting. I kept foundering on overly complicated details, self-consciously realizing that the only thing I could offer was more and more words. I wanted there to be some kind of Look I could give her that would telepathically impart my knowledge. 

Once we finally dispensed with “though,” we moved on to other questions. “Struggle” came up, in the context of people “struggling with alcohol.” Thinking I might have better luck, I turned once again to the dictionary:

struggle, v. to contend vigorously, as with an adversary or problem.

Yeesh. The dictionary makes me cry.