Where Adam went wrong... and other misnoming incidents... like asia...
Created | Updated Jul 25, 2007
In Anglisch we suffer from a dearth of knowledge on the daily personal level of what the words we take for granted really mean.
From a religious perspective, which colours our cultural pallet, this is triply dangerous, because the tendency is to treat an ignorance as a mystery and thus God's Will that We Don't Need To Know.
Which doesn't explain the popularity of Biblical Archeology.
We find it irritating that some fragments of ancient languages have managed to survive long enough to tantalize us with their indecipherablity. We find it infuriating that other more voluminous collections of ancient clay tablets and incised stelae are decipherable and are thus proven to be boring and mundane.
I haven't checked in with the Creation theology of everyone on the planet so far, so I am extremely ignorant. I am familiar with one Unfairly Tale that has a chap named Adam being scraped up out of the dirt, spat upon, breathed upon and then forced to name every other sentient creature that the creator didn't have enough sense to create a lexicon for. It is not mentioned in the Creation accounts whether the devine potter bothered to actually impart language to his creation or if he left that to the creation and it's soon to be cavorting mate to develop so they could negotiate where to put the third elbow...
Anyway, we live in a cultoure that is bound by words that were chosen for us. We rarely get to name anything except cats, dogs, dinghies, dories, yachts... Oh, and children. Or do we?
The cultural arrogance that binds the Anglisch langgage gives unnecessary names to other people, other places, that elucidate nothing and confuse everything. Where is the east if the planet is not square? I mean, okay, there is definitely a polar cap on each end of the planet. Isn't that enough of a directional demarkation? Why do we have to start pieing out the left and right of it, when there is no such thing? As a navigational aid to white guys who can't be bothered to ask the Basques the right questions?