Art/Healing/Social Justice

engagement... distance.. Art.. mediated. ..

I am a math person, I read the dictionary. I have six English Dictionaries littering my desk at home. I have three English-German, two French, one Chinese... two Latin... One Spanish and one Italian.

I have a thing about trying to figure out what people mean when they use the words they chose to convey meaning. It is amazingly confusing. Beyond the slack sentence structure, the disregard for the many, sometimes significant blurring of the use of a word over time, the habit of appropriating a word to press into a new meaning the is the introduction of words like bling and wikipedia, where you can just go in and add or change a definition.. MY GOSH!

In Iceland, they have a board of linguistic something (unpronounceable in Icelandic and incomprehensible in the US) that assesses new words that arise in the media or technology and searches to find an Icelandic word arrangement using existing Icelandic to convey the meaning of this new idea. Never the less, words creep into the spoken language and while someone is spitting contorting their soft palette in the oldest intact living language, you hear words like CD, IPOD ... but I respect the intent.

I was told this in 1971 and there is a chance that they have given up by now. It is my earliest conscious memory of the arbitrary nature of language. I thought it was a solidly fixed kind of thing. Born in 1950, I was aware of the expanding base of scientific knowledge that would require a new word, like the periodic table, and made up cultural expressions that worked their way into the dictionaries if they withstood the test of time and use, but i never thought I would have trouble understanding words that have been in use for hundreds of years.