Binomial Nomenclature
by Cassie Schifman '18
Why is it in a language with two dozen letters and million words that there's so much we can't express in our native tongue? How is it that after all the begging, borrowing and flat out stealing that we do, the English language is still incomplete?
What I mean is where other languages seem to capture the world in a noun or a verb, we leave the task to adjectives, where other languages have four words, we have one. We are okay with simplicity where complexity is required and complexity where we should have simplicity and we wind words together to express ideas in verbose paragraphs that others before us have done in three syllables.
In Ancient Greece they had three and four and five and six words for love, and we have one, and I think we should talk about how criminal that is - they drew a distinction between...well, physical love (Eros) and the unconditional love of a parent for their child (agape) - and I know that we still know that difference is there, but we still stay "I love you" to our lover and our mother and our pet dog and our best friend.
In Sweden, some people are tidsoptomists - perpetually late because they always think they have more time. Those people who miss their stop on the train because they're staring out the window and who stay awake into the wee hours of the morning reading on their laptops and who watch TV instead of meteor showers (or maybe it's the other way around...) - they're not just late or lazy - they are literally: "Time Optimists".
In Japan, people can practice the art of tsundoku - buying and leaving unread books in a pile to accumulate. And maybe that's sad but I think the image is beautiful - all those spines that have not been creased, those jackets left unblemished and smooth, and all those crisp new pages that have never been bent or broken and will never not smell like they've been taken fresh from the printing press. They'd be fulfilled but a little less perfect if you read them, and the scent of the pages is the difference between a cookie that is fresh out of the oven and one that has sat overnight.
In science, every single little living thing that there is, was, and ever will be has a name - we write it in Latin, the language of our fathers long, long before us, and in that name exists a kind of constancy that English and Swedish and Greek and Japanese can never on their own achieve. We are all of us Homo sapiens, and in that jumble of uppercase and lowercase and connotation and unfamiliarity somehow we are one. Binomial Nomenclature - that's what I really mean. That's what it's all about.
What I mean is where other languages seem to capture the world in a noun or a verb, we leave the task to adjectives, where other languages have four words, we have one. We are okay with simplicity where complexity is required and complexity where we should have simplicity and we wind words together to express ideas in verbose paragraphs that others before us have done in three syllables.
In Ancient Greece they had three and four and five and six words for love, and we have one, and I think we should talk about how criminal that is - they drew a distinction between...well, physical love (Eros) and the unconditional love of a parent for their child (agape) - and I know that we still know that difference is there, but we still stay "I love you" to our lover and our mother and our pet dog and our best friend.
In Sweden, some people are tidsoptomists - perpetually late because they always think they have more time. Those people who miss their stop on the train because they're staring out the window and who stay awake into the wee hours of the morning reading on their laptops and who watch TV instead of meteor showers (or maybe it's the other way around...) - they're not just late or lazy - they are literally: "Time Optimists".
In Japan, people can practice the art of tsundoku - buying and leaving unread books in a pile to accumulate. And maybe that's sad but I think the image is beautiful - all those spines that have not been creased, those jackets left unblemished and smooth, and all those crisp new pages that have never been bent or broken and will never not smell like they've been taken fresh from the printing press. They'd be fulfilled but a little less perfect if you read them, and the scent of the pages is the difference between a cookie that is fresh out of the oven and one that has sat overnight.
In science, every single little living thing that there is, was, and ever will be has a name - we write it in Latin, the language of our fathers long, long before us, and in that name exists a kind of constancy that English and Swedish and Greek and Japanese can never on their own achieve. We are all of us Homo sapiens, and in that jumble of uppercase and lowercase and connotation and unfamiliarity somehow we are one. Binomial Nomenclature - that's what I really mean. That's what it's all about.
