LangGut = Mental Sophistication
Betta! Evry time betta!
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What (the hell) do I mean by “LangGut”?
I’ve wanted to collect (and share, of course) terms and linguistic ideas of power for a while now. For many readers, much of this material will be quite familiar. For others, it may contain transformational insights.
What I mean by this Lang Belta-esque term “LangGut” is “good language”, “sophisticated language”, “at least some knowledge of language as an objective study”, “decent vocabulary”, and related ideas implied by “good language”. But anyone with a passing familiarity with Germanic languages probably got that from the “Lang” root (from the Latin “lingua”) and the “Gut” suffix (auf Deutsch, ‘gut’ means ‘good’, which you already know if you’ve ever heard “guten tag” —> “good day”).
If you thought it referred to the “gut”, as in the digestive system, sorry, no.
If you thought one step beyond that and wondered if it meant “gut” as in “intuitive”, that’s a cool notion, and definitely relevant because the more you know about something, the more your brain develops intuition about it. That’s beyond what I intended, but certainly relevant. :)
Words help us form ideas, help to add subtlety, to reveal gray areas, nuances. A wider vocabulary improves one’s mental sophistication.
But LangGut is about more than just vocabulary.
Take gray, for example. My whole life I’ve found the UK spelling more natural: grey. Perhaps I got that from my mother, who migrated from East Prussia to Germany, probably picking up some English along the way, possibly European English (spread by the Brits), before marrying a U.S. serviceman. Simply knowing that there are two spellings of this color, and that it’s not merely a matter of a misspelling or typographical error, widens the mind to the existence of different cultures.
Boom!
On the topic of vocabulary adding subtlety, by now it may be common knowledge that the indigenous peoples of the far north have many ways to describe frozen water and shades of color seen in frozen water, i.e. their environment. The old stories about 50 or 100 words for snow were myths, but there’s nevertheless substance to the core idea.
Inuktitut Words for Snow and Ice
Having more linguistic options for such things allows them to describe detailed routes (i.e. safe and efficient routes) across their frozen world. Where a visiting explorer at very high latitudes must rely on a magnetic compass, maybe a map, and a vocabulary as simple as “snow”, “ice”, “flat”, “broken”, “mountainous”, and other terms familiar to lower latitude types, the locals can be much more specific about where to go straight, where to turn, where to find food, where to bed down, etc., retaining and communicating knowledge of traversable, useful routes. A visitor without such linguistic sophistication might reach a dead end, or a place of thin ice or murderous crevasses, then be forced to backtrack if they survive those hazards. In the arctic, you don’t have time to do a lot of backtracking. When a clan member returns from such discoveries, it benefits all to be able to pass on what was learned.
How many different shades of a color have you used from a box of crayons? Let’s be frank. “Raw Sienna” simply won’t do when you need “Burnt Sienna”. Or would you prefer to go through life knowing only “Brown” and “Tan” and being limited to only those? This topic of LangGut is about the world we live in! Seeing it, depicting it, understanding it!
We’ll return to the topic of vocabulary and how it supports sophistication of ideas. Meanwhile, think of some of your favorite examples to share in the comments.
In the Divided States of America, it’s common for residents to refer to the D.S.A. as “America”. But that’s a conceit, co-opting all of South and North America into one self-absorbed idea of a nation. It’s so common that folks in other countries follow suit out of convenience, such is our obstinately small-minded arrogance.
My act of rebellion on that topic is to refer to the D.S.A. as “Murrica”. I’m not alone in that. Thus, language changes. “Murrica” is not yet in the online dictionary that I just checked, but it will be. It will be. It should be!
I met a guy named Camilo. His name ends in ‘o’, as do many male names in Romance languages like Español. Yet, I kept encountering Murricans who saw his name written and assumed it’s a female name, defaulting to feminine pronouns. Camilo isn’t the most common name in Murrica, so my guess is that its resemblance to the names Camille and Camilla convinced folks that this must be simply a variant of those. Well, yes, it is a variant of those, it’s the masculine form.
All it would take is mild exposure to any Romance language (which derive from Latin, i.e. the language of the Roman Empire) to know that, e.g. “Maria” is the feminine form and “Mario” is the masculine form, “Alejandra” feminine, “Alejandro” masculine, “Amelia”/”Amelio”, “Roberta”/”Roberto”. Having grown up with my ethnically Cubano family, it shocked me to see folks getting this wrong. Sure, there are always exceptions to such rules, but they’re rare. The instant I saw the name “Camilo” I knew he must be a guy, “knew” as in to a reasonable 99th percentile.
Now, I’m not a fan of languages that insist on categorizing everything by gender assignments. To be honest, it’s why I’ve never worked hard to learn and retain Spanish or German. The idea of memorizing whether salt or a table or a book is considered masculine, feminine, or neuter drives me nuts, aside from any concerns about how it affects non-binary persons. Why Latin and the Germanic languages ended up that way is outside my knowledge of anthropology.
Yet, there are dozens of genderless languages on this planet, including Turkish, Swahili, written Cantonese, Finnish, English (aside from having gender pronouns, which is not uncommon in genderless languages), Basque (a language isolate that goes back to prehistoric times), and many indigenous western hemisphere languages. It’s global, whereas Latin and the Germanic languages were not, despite the reach of the Roman Empire and the Huns. Knowing this, it’s easy to see that the notion of gender assignments is not somehow so ancient and universal that it must be “the natural way of things”. Quite the contrary. See how powerful these little bits of LangGut can be?
After Drax says, “Cease your yammering and relieve us from this irksome confinement”, the Murrican of the group refers to him as a walking thesaurus.
Yammer (v.): to talk volubly and often loudly
Irksome (adj.): causing annoyance, weariness, or vexation
Confinement (n.): the state of being confined (bound, shut in, imprisoned, restricted in movement)
What’s the difference between yammering, whining, complaining, fussing, griping, moaning, whimpering, yowling, and wailing? There is a difference! What if you only knew one word for this general category of ideas, say, “whining”? How limited you would be!
What’s the difference between irksome, aggravating, bothersome, irritating, tedious, troublesome, troubling, vexing, boring, burdensome, and tiresome? Hell, note the difference between troublesome and troubling! What if you only knew one word for this general category of ideas, say, “tedious”? How limited you would be!
What’s the difference between confinement, custody, detention, incarceration, internment, jail, repression, bonds, bounds, check, circumscription, coercion, constraint, control, cramp, curb, delimitation, keeping, limitation, safekeeping, trammels, and constrainment? What if you only knew one word for this general category of ideas, say, “control”? How limited you would be!
Thesauri were invented to capture the overlap of ideas represented by words, to help us find the right one for a particular idea. As a person experiences more of the world, subtle differences become relevant and important to understand, communicate, and record for posterity. There really is a substantive difference between whimpering about tiresome limitation and yammering about irksome confinement, both within the confines of one’s own skull and when communicating such experiences to others.
Inara refers to Mal’s work as petty thievery. Mal takes offense. Inara clarifies, offering the Chinese term Suoxi. Mal says that means “petty”. Inara explains that there are nuances of meaning. Mal’s still offended.
Does Mal not grasp the nuances of meaning of Suoxi? Or is he being deliberately obtuse?
According to the Firefly pinyinary, Suoxi means “to be small and tedious (e.g. work), to be trivial”. Do you see the difference between Suoxi and petty?
Thank you, Jane Espenson, for this level of sophistication in the language of ‘Firefly’.
Note that words can have both denotation and connotation, i.e. an explicit meaning and other nuances. At a simple level, okay, maybe Suoxi means “petty” to folks like Mal. To Inara, the nuance matters.
But this scene isn’t about an academic analysis of the connotations of “Suoxi” vs. “petty”. If these words and their related ideas didn’t exist, if all we and the characters had to work with was the word and concept “petty”, the tension between Inara and Mal about their respective careers and how intertwined they’ve become, and how they communicate about related problems, would be reduced to the petty bickering and backstabbing of reality tv. This is the power of LangGut.
Denotations and connotations, reading between the lines, subtext. Even a monolingual like me can grok the importance of such nuances, and how language helps us wrap our heads around them.
I suppose this is why I’ve always been a fan of double entendre, words and phrases that sound like they mean one thing but really can mean something else entirely. They’re fun! From homonyms, connotations, and humorous malapropisms to clever, witty repartee, double entendre reveals what separates human language (and its capacity to penetrate and divulge the sentient heart and mind) from, for example, the impressive and often beautifully complex mating behaviors of animals, or the chemical data exchange between insects, which can, in a mechanistic, algorithmic way, result in somewhat complex collective behaviors (look into bees and ants, e.g.).
Now, I’m not encouraging speciesism when I say that. As Dr. Taylor says in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”, my compassion for someone is not limited to my estimate of their intelligence.
But that doesn’t change the fact that we have yet to experience animal sophistication at the level of language let alone linguistic double entendre. This fact might even malign us. There’s the distinct possibility that our capacity for such subtlety is intimately tied to our capacity for guile, deceit, and self-deceit. But I digress. Or do I?
Terms of Power (in no particular order, not all of them English, and certainly not an exhaustive list)
In the context of LangGut and how it increases our mental sophistication (by which I mean intellectual and emotional sophistication, emotions being simply a different rendition of intelligence, something I express in “Minimum Safe Distance”), certain terms are important to know.
Everyone should be taught these terms in youth, in my opinion, both for their standalone value as concepts but also for what it says about humanity that we have these terms at all.
Cognizant
Personhood, Ubuntu
Compassion, Empathy
Torture
Agenda, Hidden Agenda, Unconscious Agenda
Pretense
Co-opt
Denotation, Connotation
Pander
Objectivity, Subjectivity
Social Engineering, Propaganda, Narrative
Spurious, Logical Fallacy, Cognitive Bias
Guile
Szalámitaktika
Myrmidon
Oligarchy
Subtext
Calumny, Character Assassination, Smear Campaign
Embellish, Spin, Paraphrase
Ostensible, Verisimilitude
Correlation
Heuristic
Mob Rule, Groupthink, Peer Pressure
Junta
Egalitarian
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Distribution of Labor
Slavery, Human Trafficking, Indentured Servitude, Debt Slavery, Domestic Slavery
Instinct
Trauma
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Obfuscate, Obfuscation
Psychosis
Aesthetic
Allege, Allegation, Evidence, Proof, Fact
Consensus, Dissent
Ambiguous
Plagiarize, Plagiarism
Analogy, Analogous
Existential
Formative
Hyperbole
Incongruous
Motif
Genes, Genetics, Genotype, Phenotype
Metaphor
Identity, Identity Validation
Rationalize, Justify
Dehumanize
Colloquial, Traditional, Taboo
Humility
Cognate
Sentient
[added later:] False Flag Operation
[added later:] Semiotics
[added later:] Compliant Victimization
To me, those several dozen words contain a vast wealth of knowledge of human history and human nature. To understand them is deeply empowering.
There are many other aspects of LangGut which are helpful at a practical level, such as knowing a little Greek and Latin in order to understand word roots, prefixes, and suffixes at first glance, at least when encountering words that have such origins.
Another practical aspect of LangGut is developing a sense of how other languages pronounce the common phonemes. This is often especially helpful when pronouncing someone’s name.
We have an Eritrean friend with the surname Tekie. No, it does not rhyme with ‘techy’. I knew instantly that it was more like ‘tek yeh’, and our friend was impressed.
This has happened to me many times, where I pronounce a name correctly, a name that to me is simply not that difficult, yet the conferee is surprised that a Murrican would get it right. How sad is that? It’s because I grew up hearing Español and Deutsch, and other languages through local culture in the NYC area. Once you actually listen to other languages spoken, even without understanding, you pick up on this.
Even when I get it wrong, just trying brightens up someone’s day. Imagine living in a country where almost no one around you even tried to get your name right.
Murricans obstinately pronounce vowels differently than the rest of the world. When we moved to Colorado, we were horrified to hear people pronounce “Pecos” as “pee cose”. Come on, Murricans. Everyone knows it’s “pay cose”, you’re just being culturist jerks when you do that.
So this is another reason to appreciate and put some effort into LangGut — simple courtesy to our non-Murrican friends, by the gods! As Uzo Aduba (Uzoamaka) has said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.” (a plea which really just means *please try*) Seriously, it’s so simple: oo zo a mah ka, just like it’s spelled.
Is it easier to find motivation to correctly pronounce “Lupita Nyong’o”?
When I was a kid, I was given a dictionary. Yes, this was before the internet. It was before computers of the ‘refrigerator-sized’ variety!
I still have it, for old times’ sake, I guess. My mother gave it to me.
It’s a decimeter thick. A tenth of a meter! And it’s heavy! It’s made of wood!
My parents were fairly uninvolved in my life. Ten years of being in an autistic fog develops habits. It’s understandable, especially back then, before the words “neurodivergent” and “autistic” were in the common vernacular. I was put in an intermediate music class, guaranteeing instant, mortifying failure. I was taken to one cub scouts meeting but never taken again. And then at 18 I left as soon as I could. I had to.
So, the standout act of giving me this gigantic dictionary, with all that it represented, had a strong effect on me, helping to establish my values and priorities.
Today, dictionaries are online, and they change rapidly, reflecting the way people speak and spell today rather than acting as repositories for knowledge continuity. As I’ve mentioned before, modern online dictionaries define chimpanzees as apes or monkeys because modern hyoomons (Echoes?) don’t care to know the difference between apes and monkeys and shamelessly use the terms interchangeably.
So, now, even though dictionaries and thesauri are a few taps away on your pocket computer, the modern learner pursuing LangGut must exercise special caution in selecting and cross-checking your educational sources.
Nevertheless, it must still be faster and easier to do so than to visit the library and look up a number of source texts in paper book form every time you want to learn something!
It’s the same, I’m sorry to say, with modern books. You’ll see NYT Bestsellers mixing up ‘then’ and ‘than’, using ‘that’ to refer to a person just to avoid having to know whether they should be using ‘who’ or ‘whom’, spelling ‘whoa’ as ‘woah’, etc. ad naus. They will say, “My characters speak that way,” but it’s just an excuse. Good form in writing has always meant using proper language, then establishing the dialectal variations of the characters through other means (e.g. choice of words, idiomatic phrases, and grammatical complexity). It’s common to see folks being more paranoid about coming across as intellectual (read ‘snobby’, in their eyes) than to come across as ignorant and lazy. I don’t get it.
But I digress again. Or do I?
Anyway, I’m here to tell you that reading remains a very powerful way to work on your LangGut. Read both fiction by LangGut storytellers and non-fiction by educated communicators. Read “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan, and anything by Franz DeWaal. Read Claudia Christian’s memoir, “Babylon Confidential”. Read “The City We Became” by N.K. Jemisin. And so on! You can have a ton of fun in the pursuit of LangGut! Just promise me you’ll look up words as needed. :)
If you’ve gotten this far, kudos.
Shirley, by now it’s obvious that developing one’s LangGut is empowering, enjoyable, and just plain courteous. The mind empowered by LangGut can fully, objectively enjoy the depths and subtleties of the real world while being courteous to neighbors. There’s simply nothing wrong about that, and everything gut about it. Most of the rest of the world is multi-lingual, which comes with a certain amount of LangGut for free. We in Murrica can at least try to develop our LangGut!
Auf wiedersehn! Ciao! Hasta la vista! Hurrengora arte!