Words are fleeting, they say. They get gone with the wind. I read somewhere that nobody knows the exact number of words that have ever been written. Not even a vague approximation. Whatever that may be, the number of words that have ever been spoken has got to be way higher. Orders of magnitude higher.
Spoken words do not remain. They leave our lips and disintegrate, evaporate, cease to exist the moment they’re voiced. If they’re meaningful to us, they linger on, float in our beings for a while, creating thoughts and emotions. For the most part, though, they vanish. And I’ve never been okay with that. I’ve never accepted the idea that they’re lost forever, as inevitable as that is. Granted, there’s nothing I can do about that. But the idea that spoken words can only be heard once (unless they’re repeated, although a repeated word is a different word) strikes me as a waste of expression -- to me, the most precious of human abilities.
But many words are recorded, you might argue. And increasingly so. Therefore, a certain amount of spoken words -- the recorded ones -- can be heard as many times as we want and are always accessible. Indeed they are, I’d respond. But recorded words are just a copy of the words that were actually spoken. They’re not the Mona Lisa, they’re a copy of the Mona Lisa. When we hear the recording of MLK’s I have a dream speech, we get in a state where we may already know our reaction, or at least the direction that our reaction might go in. Somehow, we’re in control of what happens to us. Those who heard those words right from the lips of MLK, that very day, were the lucky beneficiaries of awe, surprise, joy, rage, and a plethora of other derivative emotions and consequent thoughts. All unexpected, many uncontrollable, some unrepeatable. There’s value in hearing words spoken live, before they’re gone forever.
Sometimes I fantasize that spoken words don’t get lost, that they go somewhere. That there’s a place in the universe where they all travel to, once they part with our lips. They get there, after a long journey, and stay. And they fly around like butterflies. I imagine that this place is a planet in a distant galaxy. A planet large enough to accomodate all the words ever spoken in the history of humankind. There’s no shortage of space in the universe, I guess. If one went there, they’d be surrounded by flying words, and they’d be able to hear them again and again as spoken right there, by the same voice that emitted them originally, and feel the same original emotions, and have the same original thoughts. But no one can go to that planet. Nobody knows where it is. Maybe you’d have to get sucked into multiple black holes to get there, or maybe it’s just plain impossible.
Spoken words get to their distant planet effortlessly. It’s their paradise -- they live there in eternity. As they settle, they form a patchwork of human expression. They make the place alive with the echoes of laughter, cries of sorrow, declarations of love, and the thunderous roars of anger. A place where the words spoken by philosophers mingle with the musings of children. It’s like the universe’s wildest open mic, where words dance unbridled between emotion and meaning.
Then, when we need or want to hear some spoken words again, we can summon them at will. And within seconds, they return to Earth, replaying themselves with the same tone and emphasis and pathos. Much like we open a book to re-read some written words when we need or want to. When we’re done with them, they travel back to their distant planet, and continue to fly around immortally, with no end in sight.
When I was in second grade and my sister in first, our school was down the road from our house. We had to cross a couple of streets to get there, and traffic was always pretty intense at that time of the morning for a small town in the early seventies. Mom let us go on our own. I’ll watch you from the window, she said, but make sure you always hold hands and look left and right before crossing the street. As the elder of the two, I was responsible for following Mom’s directions and safely conducting us to school. One day, while crossing the street, my sister tripped on something and fell, her school things spread on the ground. I immediately positioned myself between her and the direction of traffic, opened my arms wide, and demanded that cars stop. They did, and waited until she picked herself and her stuff up. We resumed crossing, hand in hand and all. I was so proud of having handled the situation that way. Thinking of that now, I could only imagine Mom’s apprehension as she witnessed that scene from her window.
I’d give anything to hear again the words that were spoken that day between the two of us on our way to school, and between us and Mom, when we got back home and told her all about it (as if she hadn’t seen everything herself already). I’d give anything to replay all the words that were spoken that day at our lunch table, when Dad came back from work.
It’s funny how, when I first thought about this spoken words fantasy, I was focused on the words that I had heard from others in the past, in particular circumstances. And so I thought that it would be nice to hear again things I hadn’t caught properly, or things I didn’t know how to respond to, or things I needed to hear multiple times to boost my confidence or better understand something. Or just things that made me feel good. But then I realized that maybe hearing again some of the words that I myself spoke would be equally fascinating. And surprising, and revealing. Sometimes, I am a mystery to myself.
Aren’t we all?
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Hi. Just a clarification on your essay.
1) You seem to contradict yourself when say spoken words disappear forever once they're uttered. Not accurate. You say later that words can be drawn on at will to use again. This is accurate.
2) You said there was no way to determine how many words a person knows. There is a way, it's called a Vocabulary Size Test.
Vocabulary Size Test was first conceived by I.S.P. Nation (2009,https://docs.google.com/document/d/1brS_lQRLzVx11-l352qgCD8nD6c_nKgxdMMZ66MEIXI/edit?pli=1).
I used it in my PhD when I explored the process of vocabulary learning (2013). I wanted to find evidence that it is real and that everyone uses it. I used a psycholinguistic approach, and some other approaches, a combination of perspectives to gain insights into the process a person goes through when they learn a word (or use one).
The average pre-university student uses around 9,000 words, while the teacher/lecturer would use between 10,000 and 15,000 words. These levels of vocabulary contains both high-frequency words and low-frequency words. High-frequency words are used every day, while low-frequency words are not used every day e.g., academic, scientific, medical.
"It’s funny how, when I first thought about this spoken words fantasy, I was focused on the words that I had heard from others in the past, in particular circumstances. And so I thought that it would be nice to hear again things I hadn’t caught properly, or things I didn’t know how to respond to, or things I needed to hear multiple times to boost my confidence or better understand something."
The process of vocabulary learning is complex, and everyone is different; have differing experiences linked to word learning. Hence the large range of strategies used to learn new words or anything for that matter; (Nation, 2009) called it the difference between 'item knowledge' and 'system knowledge'.
Item knowledge concerns the 'orthographic', the word form or forms e.g., 'dog', 'school', 'city', and squeeze. System knowledge concerns the various features of a word, e.g., phonological, orthographic, and semantic aspects of the word, including the words relationship to other words in a person's mental lexicon.
Word forms - spoken, written, and word parts (base, affixes). Word meaning: connecting form and meaning - concept, referents, associations. Word use: grammatical functions, collocations, and constraints. This is why people will vary in the knowledge and/or experience associated with learning a word and what they already know.
And why there is a process and that the process will vary between and among people. But what is spoken is already known and resides in the brain in the form of representations (concept, referents, associations). When a person uses a word - they couldn't use a word they don't know - they're experience of it may differ from the next person, sometimes wildly, and they will also draw on all the semantic and connotative aspects of the word e.g., a words sense, that will be the first listed aspect of the word in a dictionary.
I guess what I am saying with all this is that uttered words do not disappear forever; they live in the brain. But you're right when you say is difficult if not impossible recall what some said to when a large amount of time has elapsed since first hearing the words. And that has to do with the brain's limitations. The fact that a person can create an utterance and deliver it, highlights its generative nature, but it doesn't let us remember an utterance once it is used.
Remembering utterances would require a complex set of strategies use to remember it. The words in the utterance are all there in your brain along with the knowledge of a word, which means people don't speak in sentences, or phrases, etc., requires the creative aspect to construct them. Baring neurological issues and/or disease.
Recalling words and constructing utterances is a breeze compared remembering and recalling what someone said. And why the majority of people use a complex social strategy like asking the speaker to repeat what they said (not just if the listener didn't understand it the first time) to understand the meaning of the utterance (not the actual words). That kind of negotiation goes on all the time.
Sadly, not much research exits on why people can't remember what someone said (even though the words that made up the utterance are in the listener's brain, or not); the research tends to focus on how, why, when, where, and who, of the utterance, or diseases like Alzheimer's. There's also a lot of research on forgetting. Hypothetically, a person might use a complex set of strategies, which may result in partial remembrance; for at least one aspect of the task, like remembering the when, where, and who of the utterance. Involve all the senses or one. Remembering snippets, associations may result in reconstructing the utterance.
Sounds like hard work, right? Of course, there are a few assumptions being made. But hypothesis testing is something we do every day not just on special occasions. Thanks for your post, it gave me inspiration to explore the topic again.
I love this ethereal musing on the life of words beyond their temporary utterance. Maybe spoken words are like a massive tree blowing in the wind, silence sometimes prevails, and depending on the weather there can be rustling, howling, creaking, bird song, or the calamity of an occasional thunder strike. But with all that coming and going of noise, the roots are always there. There is an underground force of tenacious residence that never falters or goes away. For myself I don't imagine it's the words that endure, but the being who has spoken them. Words that come from Being are an enduring echo of that essence. And then roots between these trees of being are connected. I often have the sense that there are layers of connection between sentient beings that we are always at the effect of but just can't "see" with the tangible senses. Like this week I have been thinking a lot about the intersection of writing and speaking, and then today our friend Rik wrote about the same subject, and now your essay about recorded and spoken words.