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Language and Perception

Language is something that we are required to use in our everyday lives. We use it in many ways to describe things that we do in life, or things that have happened to us. When we use language though, we are presented with a problem. If we are able to describe everything that we do, we face the risk of generalizing it with language. Since describing an experience to someone is always a second-hand description is they were not there to experience this thing for themselves, the occurrence becomes generalized in our language.

For most cases in our existence, language generalizes experience, but for some instances, it eludes the ability to even give a description. This argument can be taken many ways. To start out with, what do we mean when we say experience? In this context, experiences are the occurrences that happen in your life. To be a personal experience, three criteria must be met. First, it must have happened to you. You cannot expect something to be a personal experience if it has never happened to you. Second, you must have perceived it.

If you never saw something, heard something, felts something, tasted something, or smelt something, then it cannot be classified as a personal experience. For example, if Johnny was walking down the street and a car splashed water all over him, that is his own personal experience of getting soaking wet. He saw and felt it most likely. The third requirement is that you must remember it. If you do not remember the thing happen to you, then who is to say that it happened or not? All these things are required to have a personal experience.

Now that experience has been adequately defined, how does language work against it? For starters, language can generalize experience. Language can do this in three ways: Repetition and Devaluing. To help explain these two concepts, let's start out with an example story. Johnny has just had something amazing happen to him, he has just jumped non-stop with a jump rope 1001 times. Johnny is very proud of this personal experience and wants to share it with everybody because he is the very first one to jump 1001 times.

He jumps online to post it on every social networking site under the Sun. As soon as he gets on the internet, he gets curious. He goes to his favorite search engine and types in "1001 jumps with a jump rope". Johnny is highly disheartened at what he sees. On the page he is looking at, there are hundreds of accounts of people, like Johnny, who have jumped 1001 times with a jump rope. This is the repetition method of language generalization. Many times, an experience might seem like it is personal only to you.

But when you check your facts, you see that many other people have done the same exact thing you have done. This method of generalization diminishes the amount of personality behind your own experiences. It makes certain experiences lose their personal touch because you realize that so many other people have done the same exact thing in their lives as well. The second method is compression. Let's say that Johnny went to his search engine and instead of typing "1001 jumps with a jump rope", he typed in "most jumps with a jump rope". What he saw there would dishearten him even more.

On the new page, he sees results that describe people's personal experience of jumping over one million times. This is the compression method. Language can compress and diminish the value of our personal experiences. It makes it as if when we do something, we can never fully be recognized for it because there is always someone who has done it better or for twice as long. These two methods work against the personality and value of experiences, and generalize them in many different ways. So what is the result of a generalized experience then?

Many times, it is disregarded and ignored. If someone tells a story about how they ran for an hour, nobody is going to remember that in a day or two because it is nothing out of the ordinary; it has been done before. Sometimes, it is laughed about. It all depends on what kind of experience is being retold. There are those certain types of experiences though that cannot be generalizes. . . Right about now, you are probably asking, "What kinds of experiences cannot be generalized? " Well there are not many that fit into this category.

Whenever you hear someone talking about how something is "indescribable" or "words do not do it justice", these are the personal experiences that elude expression in language. A good example of this is the Aurora Borealis, the northern lights. People experience this natural phenomenon all the time in the northern portions of the northern hemisphere. They come away with a new experience that will never exit their mind. When asked to describe this experience though, they find they cannot. They struggle to even find words that begin to describe their personal experience.

Personal experiences like these elude the ability to be generalized. Of course, many people have seen the Aurora, but that does not make it less beautiful and mystifying. The Aurora is always different as well. New colors and patterns fill the sky at every occurrence. These are the worldly experiences that cannot seem to be put into words that "can do it justice. " There are also the universal experiences. These are the experiences that involve God and his abilities. For example, a vision from God is a universal experience.

You can verbalize what you saw in the vision, but you cannot really explain what happened or how it happened. Your only option is to say that it is a universal experience and that God had a hand in what just happened to you. Language works, in many ways, against the "personal experience". When someone feels like they have accomplished something great and something that made them feel like they were the king of the world, there is always another personal experience that shows that it has been done before or even that someone has done it better.

In this way, language generalizes ideas and experiences. There are those that cannot be generalized or retold in a manner that suits the way that the experience happened. If this is the case though, how can we be certain that they even occurred? We can only base our opinion on the feelings and limited expressions of language that people use to describe it. Language can be seen as a very ambiguous topic in this manner.