Sometimes; maybe; always; no; yes; never; What do these words mean to you? How many combinations can you make out of these words so that they have different meanings? In Lloyd Schwartz’s poem “ six words” written in 1941, he uses these words in different orders and punctuations to express the process of his thoughts and ideas. Schwartz uses few words and complicated poetic devices but leaves space to the audience, letting them feel how his idea changes by using six exact same words.
Different combinations of these six words can create completely different meanings. This poem not only expresses Lloyd Schwartz’s own idea but can be applied to everyone’s life. For example, when you are going to make a life decision and you see Schwartz’s poem, you might apply your life into the poem and the poem would help you develop your own idea. The technique of using limited words to allow the audiences with unlimited imaginations so that each of them can have his own interpretation, employed by Schwartz, is called giving “freedom to words” according to Virginia Woolf.
Back in 1937 when Virginia Woolf delivered her famous speech called “Craftsmanship”, she first introduced the freedom of words and criticizes poets and novelists for not giving freedom to words by saying: “Perhaps the one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty.” Certainly, Lloyd Schwartz, for his intriguing poem that shows how it is possible to use limited words to express unlimited thoughts, is not one of the failed poets that Virginia Woolf argues about.
In “Craftsmanship”, she denies the use of words by saying “Now we know little that is certain about words, but this we do know — words never make anything that is useful.” Admittedly, it seems unusual for an author to deny the use of words and claim the teaching of words as “unnecessary”. She then clarifies that it is because those words mean more than one thing which goes against the definition of “useful statement”. What Woolf is emphasizing is, again, the ambiguous nature of words. Since there are so many ways to understand a single word, Virginia Woolf considers words as “the wildest, freest, most irresponsible and most unteachable of all things”. She also adds that language arouses imagination, memory, eye, and the ear at the same time, which is a procedure of understanding which involves not only the words themselves but also different regions of our bodies and minds.
When Woolf said that “words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind”, she wouldn’t imagine that words do physically live in our brains. Amusingly, this theory that the interpretation of a single word requires more than one biological region developed by Virginia Woolf in 1937 is approved today by different neuro-scientific studies; the study “Context-Dependent Interpretation Of Words: Evidence For Interactive Neural Processes” conducted by Silvia P. Gennari from University of York, department of psychology, investigated the neural mechanisms involved in computing word meanings that change as a function of syntactic context. The author states that word meanings are retrieved from diverse cortical regions storing sensory-motor and other types of semantic information, and are further integrated with the context in the “left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG)”.
When Virginia Woolf uses her speech to say that words themselves are free so that people should not put them in strict patterns and rules to shut off the possibilities of words, she fails to consider much about the other important role in language communication: the interpreters, which might be the reason why some of the audience of her speech considered it “too harsh”. The study complements her ideas by providing a reliable explanation of how we people deal with these words.
What the study conveys is that our brain interprets things based on the context and environment of language. It gives a simple example of how the word “bowl” means differently by adding “to” and “a” before the word (“to bowl” and “a bowl”). By adding a single word, our brains detect the context and react to it accordingly. This point can also be found in Woolf’s speech when she says that “old words can create beauty in new orders, new contexts”.
When we try to communicate through language, there are four components required according to the famous linear model of communication: the encoder (speaker), the channel, the message itself, and the decoder (listener); if any of these four components goes wrong, miscommunication happens. Virginia Woolf focuses herself more on the words and messages while the study provides us more about how the decoders respond to the message.
Not only does the interpretation of words depend outwardly on the context and environment the encoder provides as the study and Virginia Woolf have mentioned, but inwardly on the cortical regions in our brain which store our senses and memories as well. In other words, communication also depends on the “profiles” of both encoders and decoders;
“Profile” is a term that includes a person’s age, nationality, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc. There are so many factors influencing how we interpret things, and such uncertainty would always exist no matter how hard we try, and when people read an essay or a novel, they would interpret stories and ideas differently based on their profiles. The meaning of a “rose” can be different for those who have been married for a long time and for those who are still crazy in love.
Knowing that there are so many ways miscommunication can exist in our language, people try every means to avoid such miscommunication and try to control words, not giving words any freedom as Woolf has suggested. Admittedly, Woolf has her point that we should not push ourselves toward strict molds and rules and try to avoid the uncertainty of words. However, it is actually a common thing to avoid uncertainty.
The fear of uncertainty exists in almost every culture and it is so common that the famous psychologist Geert Hofstede created the notion “the avoidance of uncertainty” as a cultural dimension in cross-cultural communication. The uncertainty avoidance dimension relates to the level of tolerance or comfort for ambiguity, uncertainty, and unstructured situations. Every culture has a tendency toward certainty, the only difference is that some have high avoidance of uncertainty and some have low.
People who have high avoidance of uncertainty, are less comfortable with ambiguity and attempt through rules, laws, and controls to reduce the possibility of uncertainty. On the contrary, people who have low avoidance of uncertainty, are more relaxed in the face of ambiguity or unstructured situations. However, no matter which level of avoidance of uncertainty people have, there is a shared desire of being as specific as possible.
We add contexts and details to our language, both in verbal and non-verbal ways. We put on angry faces and point at someone while we are arguing; we smile and embrace others while we are expressing love and happiness. We invented computer languages, such as python, java, c++, which only has true or false and is only composed of 1s and 0s. We simplified the language in order to obtain an absolutely certain language. We also use emojis and stickers to express our feelings simply by mimicking the actual looks in order to give out a direct and specific attitude. Woolf gives out examples of how people avoid uncertainty: people started to invent a new language, as she states, “a language perfectly and beautifully adapted to express useful statements, a language of signs”. She uses examples of Michelin signs and stars stuck to paintings.
However, miscommunication still exists. Computer languages are still being worked on because glitches appear when computers start to be confused about the instructions; Emojis are always misinterpreted based on people’s own experiences and identities. For example, a smiling face can mean joyful and happy to our mothers but can also mean blackmail and evil to younger generations.
Now people have to admit that pure certainty is never going to be obtained in this world because there are things we can or can not control in the process of communication. What we can control is that we can learn basic language skills and grammar rules so that we can be able to at least express our main ideas so that people can understand what we are talking about. However, the difference between the decoder and encoder is always something that we can not take control over. The slight difference between the intention of encoders and the interpretation of decoders is also not controllable. Then how should we deal with such uncertainty? Should we give up and accept it or should we try other means to eliminate it?
The answer is that we should take full control over what we can control. For example, the channel of our message. If my classmate in my art class messages me to give her some honest critiques on her artwork via text, I would tell her that I would meet her in person and give her some suggestions. In this example, I am avoiding the online channel and trying to communicate face to face. The reason behind it is that critiques can be really misunderstood if you can not see that person and a friendly suggestion might turn into an argument. or and at the same time, let go of those we do not have control over other people’s profiles, experiences, etc. For example, when you are giving a speech to a diverse group of people, you do not have to specify your speech so that it can target every single person in the room. What you should do is that you leave space for different people and let them expand more based on their own experiences. What we want to do is to find the balance between specification and uncertainty.
Interestingly, for the parts that we can take control of, Christy Wampole, in her “the Essayification of Everything”, states that writers should still hold ambiguity. She specifically talks about essay writing. According to her, an essay, called “Essaic” in ancient times, means “attempt”. Normally when we say “attempt”, we think of an effort to achieve. However, Wampole uses it quite differently when she introduces an essay as an attempt, which is a putting forth of effort to accomplish what is uncertain or difficult. It is quite interesting that the meaning itself contains the writer’s main point of view that essays are ambiguous and not certain. Maybe it shows that essays, in the beginning when they were invented, should be something that contains ambiguous and complicated thoughts rather than anything that is absolute and straightforward.
The ambiguity Wampole is suggesting is not the same as what Woolf expresses, even though they both talk about the uncertainty in language. When Woolf says that words do not make anything useful, so we should not put restrictions on words but embrace the uncertainty of words, the ambiguity that Wampole suggests is more reasonable and acceptable: she emphasizes the ambiguity of thoughts and ideas of the author. According to her, the essay is a “short nonfiction prose with a meditative subject at its center and a tendency away from certitude”. Wampole, unlike Woolf, does not require the absolute freedom of words, but asks for the freedom of thoughts; Similarly, she does not advocate the avoidance of the absolute certitude of words, but the certitude of thoughts. What it means is that Wampole still expects us to utilize language skills so that we use the right words to express our feelings. Actually what she expects is a relatively higher control over words so that the authors can use the right and absolute words to describe the swerving and ambiguous ideas. For example, the author has to find the exact words to describe even a slight change in the mood or attitude.
To embrace the ambiguity of thoughts, the author has to first use proper words and provide specific details to give the audience a sense of what he is trying to convey, a general direction; Take “Six-Word” for example, though not an essay, Schwartz uses only six words to compose the poem, he still adds on punctuations and put words in different orders to provide a little context to the audiences. He still has to find out these six exact words from so many words he learned so that the effect would be the best. However, words would still arouse audiences’ different interpretations because uncertainty would happen based on people’s different profiles. When authors provide enough context to words, they put their own identities, memories, and experiences into these words, but the audiences imagine and reflect on the essay by themselves. Such uncertainty is not scary at all; On the contrary, it is these ambiguous interpretations that form the beauty of essays. People would never appreciate a dull story in which everyone hates the same evil character and feel exactly the same about the story. Instead, those pieces of literature that arouse different feelings about one exact character and a mixture of hatred and love toward the story are the artworks that are popular and worth memorizing. Just as the well-known Asian proverb says, “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes”.
Not only in essays, but the same logic can also be applied to any art form that we consider beautiful. Dating back to ancient times, ancient writing styles including Hieroglyphic, Cuneiform, Hieratic, which we can say are forms of painting and they gradually became the written language we use every day. I would say there are a lot of similarities between language and art, especially regarding how uncertainty works.
Take Chinese ancient painting as an example, when painters start to paint a willow tree, they start with a stroke. By a simple stroke, we can not tell if it is a willow tree or not; we can easily misinterpret the leave of the willow tree as the leave of an orchid. This ambiguity specifically is similar to the ambiguity in language. Not one painter would say he can express his ideas by one stroke, just like it is implausible for a writer to express his ideas in one word. Then, as the painter adds color, stems, along with other details, we start to see the difference and learn what he is trying to convey based on our knowledge of the appearance of a willow tree. Through this process, the painter is adding contexts so that audiences would have a basic knowledge of what he is painting. This process is very similar to the process of writing. The act of adding strokes and using painting techniques is to add more details to the painting so that people would understand the basic idea.
However, no matter how well the technique and how detailed the painting is, there is still ambiguity happening in the painting based on people’s different perspectives. For example, if the painter paints two friends sitting under the willow tree, people with different profiles would have divergent interpretations; for those who know the tradition that ancient Chinese use the leaves of willow trees as gifts for departing friends, they would say these two friends are about to be separate so they are saying goodbye. For those who don’t know about the tradition, they might think the two people are appreciating the beauty of nature.
From different perspectives, people see everything in their distinct ways. In terms of language, interpretation relies on the audiences’ profiles; when writing an essay, what we should consider is how to utilize our language skills so that we can use the words to both describe the ambiguous smart thoughts of us and still leave space for audiences’ expanded and personal interpretation at the same time. Uncertainty is always accompanied by any form of communication and expression, we fight against it when it blurs the key concepts we are trying to convey, and yet we embrace it when its presence arouses the imagination and further reflections. The beauty of uncertainty appears when we are all standing in front of the one and only Monet’s Garden, but deep in our hearts, there are different kinds of flowers blooming in that garden.
Wampole, Christy. “The Essayification of Everything.” The New York Times, 26 May. 2013, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/the-essayification-of-everything/. Accessed 1 April 2018.
“Virginia Woolf’s voice, 1937 — “Craftsmanship” (complete), BBC broadcast / subtitled” YouTube, Uploaded by betapicts, 3 Feb. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcbY04JrMaU.
Gennari, Silvia.“Context- Dependent Interpretation Of Words: Evidence For Interactive Neural Processes” Science Direct, 2007, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811907000456
Smit, Chris.”What is Uncertainty Avoidance?” Culture Matters, 21 Oct. 2016, /culturematters.com/what-is-uncertainty-avoidance.
Schwartz, Lloyd. “Six Words”, Poets.org, 1941, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/six-words.
