Are You Addicted to Language?

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Are you addicted to language?

Total addict; it's my LIFE	25%	[ 16 ]
Heavy use; most of my day is spent on reading/writing/talking	45%	[ 29 ]
I need a significant ( 1 - 2 hours ) daily dose to feel normal	11%	[ 7 ]
Indulge frequently/often, but can also go for days without reading/writing/talking, no problem	2%	[ 1 ]
Social user, when in company or on WP, otherwise only for purely practical purposes	0%	[ 0 ]
No, I use it only when absolutely necessary.	6%	[ 4 ]
Used to be; am trying to cut down	3%	[ 2 ]
Other, please expand in thread	9%	[ 6 ]

Total votes : 65

twix93
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03 May 2009, 12:02 pm

I am completely addicted to foreign languages - But not English.

sartresue
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03 May 2009, 12:07 pm

Language.comm topic

I do not see heavy language use as an addiction, which is pathological, and leads to disease.

Reading, writing and other forms of communication are as essential to my life as breathing. I may be obsessed with certain ways of imparting and receiving information, but I do not consider this obsession to be an addiction, just a preference. It has done no harm to me or others.

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animal
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04 May 2009, 4:19 am

ruveyn wrote:

Anyone who thinks is a Heavy User of language. Language and thinking go completely together.

ruveyn

Yes. I think that is what I was trying to say in my earlier post. It's just that there are so many different types of language. That's what interests me.

FireBird
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04 May 2009, 2:05 pm

I read and speak 24/7. I literally can't live without the Internet!

ouinon
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04 May 2009, 4:10 pm

ruveyn wrote:

Anyone who thinks is a "heavy user" of language. Language and thinking go together.

sartresue wrote:

I do not see heavy language use as an addiction, which is pathological, and leads to disease. Reading, writing and other forms of communication are as essential to my life as breathing. I may be obsessed with certain ways of imparting and receiving information, but I do not consider this obsession to be an addiction, just a preference. It has done no harm to me or others.

That is certainly the western attitude towards language. Western religions have tended to glorify language, ( "In the beginning was the word" etc ), but eastern spiritual traditions on the other hand seem to consider language as much of a lure/pitfall/delusion as wealth/possessions and the body. Many of the zen koans are designed to explode/expose language as illusion.

Whereas many people are "inflamed" by the apparent value of material wealth, bodily sensations, or social connections/group participation, some/certain people are inflamed/intoxicated by language, especially the most abstract language, and identify with it as compulsively as others do with their possessions, human contact, or physical pleasures.

Buddhism, ( especially Zen B), seems to believe that language, whether thought, read or written, is as "attaching"/consuming as everything else, and the more dangerous for being so pervasive and apparently immaterial/"unworldly, ( as ruveyn said "anyone who thinks is heavy user" ). Buddhism teaches ways to detach oneself from it; koans and meditation.

But in fact many people do not think, ( or read or write ), very much. They are intoxicated by other things, things that some of us look down on too, :wink:

believing ourselves above that sort of "attachment". Language has a "good" reputation in that sense, compared to possessions, or the body. It is associated, in the West at least, with enlightenment/wisdom/understanding.

Are you so sure that heavy use of language does not harm anyone?

For a start it is a form of consumption, which like most consumerism, contributes not only to its "growth/increase", but also to the power of those wielding/controlling it, ( we "buy it" ) . Very few people create "new" language; they just use what has been produced by others, and to some extent reproduce it.

And language has a powerful effect on perception/experience, ( because most people "believe in" the virtual reality that it creates ), and on human activity/society. Is heavy language use really so innocent/harmless? Perhaps the "language-habit" is as responsible for global-warming and peak-oil as people who love cars.
.

Last edited by ouinon on 04 May 2009, 5:01 pm, edited 3 times in total.

ragingbullfrog
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04 May 2009, 4:41 pm

I am always finding things to read. On the toilet, I even read shampoo bottles or aftershave packets or anything to hand.

I love writing, even though my hand writing is poor. I feel I have an excellent imagination if I write things down, however, cant always articulate my self through speech. I need all the facts handy for talking, so I write it sown instead.

ouinon
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04 May 2009, 5:26 pm

Quote:

It is a form of consumption, which like most consumerism, contributes not only to its "growth/increase", but also to the power of those wielding/controlling it. And language has a powerful effect on perception/experience, ( because most people "believe in" the virtual reality that it creates; and "heavy language users" really "buy it" ), and on human activity/society. Perhaps the "language-habit" is as responsible for global-warming and peak-oil as people who love cars.

Both bloody revolutions and wars of religion have been justified by some of the most intensive language-production/manufacture in history.

That's why I said on the first page of this thread that perhaps language is, for some/certain people, like the ring in "The Lord of the Rings", something some/certain people need to detach themselves from, because although it is source of great beauty etc it is also the source of great harm/destruction.

Interestingly, Tolkien was obsessed with/by language. It was his "special interest". :wink:

Rocky
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05 May 2009, 1:40 am

I voted "Heavy" but I probably should have voted "...is my Life." Whenever possible, I am either reading (usually on my PDA) or listening to the radio (usually news and talk.) I earned a B.A. in English and minored in Spanish. I am a linguophile! I don't have as much time as I would like for the fora, but I often copy threads to my PDA for reading later.

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Rocky
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05 May 2009, 1:48 am

ouinon wrote:

Quote:

As Laurie Anderson sang: "Language- It's a virus!"

She probably meant that in the sense of a Meme. Who was it who introduced the concept of the meme? I can't remember. Was it Richard Dawkins?

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animal
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05 May 2009, 3:38 am

ouinon-

Yes, I agree that we Westerners glorify language a lot, and I know that Eastern philosophies are in some ways about the retreat from the word rather than the apotheosis of it. Although there were, of course, the silent orders of monks & nuns, who believed that you needed to escape everyday language in order to be closer to God. Although, as you said, God is "the word", so they weren't escaping language altogether.

I'm not sure that you can ever entirely escape from language. This is because I happen to use language differently to most people, and what I mean by "language" is different to what most people mean by language. To me, thought always requires language. Not verbal languages like English or French, or even visual languages, musical languages or mathematical languages (although many people do indeed think in these languages). Just systems for ordering information. To me, that is what language is. I know it's a broader definition of "language" than is generally accepted, but that is what the word "language" has come to mean to me. The word "language" is part of my private lexicon as well as being part of the public one.

Here is something I wrote on Facebook that may clarify the matter:

Quote:

There is a difference between self and sense of self. Self could easily be arbitrary. A chair has a self because I interpret its visual expression as "chair". Its parts seem to belong together, like they are one object. A stack of chairs has a self because I interpret its visual expression as "stack of chairs". The chairs in the stack seem to belong together, like they are one object. So sometimes a thing will have its own self - it will appear to act against other selves as a discrete entity so it will be useful to give it a self - and sometimes it will be one part of a greater self. A cog, or part of the machine. A man, or part of the crowd.

So self occurs because it is useful/appropriate to call the thing "thing". A self. Important: it is not a thing _before_ it has been sensed and interpreted as a thing. Nothing is anything before interpretative language has been applied to it. This does not mean that nothing _exists_ before it is interpreted, only that it is meaningless to say "this is a thing that exists regardless of language" because the concepts of "thing" or "existence" or "this" are part of the language we use to make sense of the input from our senses. We cannot assume that simply because we interpret the world as being composed of things, that it actually _is_, objectively, composed of things. "Objectively" is a meaningless concept. Language is not an objective thing. It is subjective, especially the language of our thoughts.

When I talk about language here, I mean a system for ordering input (and potential output) so that it can be understood. Without an ordering system, without the ability to define, collect, collate, pigeonhole what we experience, we understand nothing.

The point I am trying to make here is that the world is only "the world" because we call it so. Because we need to call it so. Because we apply order to it in order to facilitate necessary action.

There is a problem here: if there is no intrinsic self, but only applied selves, then the "I" that has to apply selves to the world is also only an applied self. How can something that is meaningless without language first begin to act as a self in the first place? Maybe this is only a problem because I am getting caught up in language. Maybe this is why babies have to _learn_ that they are discrete entities.

Do you see where I'm coming from with this?

We are bound up in our private languages. We are bound up in our worlds. To me, that is reality.

Have you ever read anything by Julia Kristeva? I'm just getting into her now, and it's quite interesting with regards to language, particularly the relationship between women and language.

ouinon
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05 May 2009, 12:59 pm

Rocky wrote:

As Laurie Anderson sang: "Language- It's a virus!"

She probably meant that in the sense of a Meme. Who was it who introduced the concept of the meme? I can't remember. Was it Richard Dawkins?

He popularised it, but didn't invent it. He spread the meme of "meme"! :wink:

I read that language can be described remarkably comprehensively as an organism that is in symbiotic/parasitical relationship with our species. And that its behaviour, ( evolution, structure, and effects etc ) , can be predicted very accurately on the basis of this model.

.

ouinon
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05 May 2009, 1:17 pm

animal wrote:

I know that Eastern philosophies are in some ways about the retreat from the word rather than the apotheosis of it. Although there were, of course, the silent orders of monks & nuns, who believed that you needed to escape everyday language in order to be closer to God. Although, as you said, God is "the word", so they weren't escaping language altogether.

I think it is possible that "god" is a metasymbol in the same way as the royal family in the uk are , which "supports" the system of class/aristocracy etc, by holding a sort of uber-meaning. "God" may be in fact a product of language in same way as certain mathematical symbols are required/created by the existence of other mathematical symbols. Virtually all of the attacks on/criticisms of "god" could be applied equally well to all other words. And trying to get rid of the concept "god" while still believing in, ( attached to/identifying with ) other words would be as "impossible", or at least as difficult, as getting rid of zero and/or infinity while have numbers.

animal wrote:

There is a problem here: if there is no intrinsic self, but only applied selves, then the "I" that has to apply selves to the world is also only an applied self. How can something that is meaningless without language first begin to act as a self in the first place? Maybe this is only a problem because I am getting caught up in language. Maybe this is why babies have to _learn_ that they are discrete entities.

We are bound up in our private languages. We are bound up in our worlds. To me, that is reality.

"I" is as much of a nebulous thing as "Aspergers", or "god". It requires belief in language as reality. It requires that one accept the virtual reality of language. But I am not sure that we need to use verbal language as much as we do in the modern world. It has simply proliferated, like a life form. .

Quote:

Have you ever read anything by Julia Kristeva?

A little.

I think that people may have once upon a time have argued as much about the meaning of "tree" as we do about the meaning of the word Aspergers on WP, or "god". All words are labels. Language is just a mass of labels. And every word is as much a choice of priorities/signification as the word Aspergers. Each word was once a label being introduced to describe a person's or group's perception of a category, and probably went through the kind of evolution that Aspergers is doing. Debated, explored, defined, disagreed on, before popular use of it decides its place/function in the generally accepted "virtual world" that language creates.

.

ouinon
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05 May 2009, 1:29 pm

I am wondering whether language addiction has a similar effect on me as my addictions to gluten and casein, ( as a result of my gluten and casein intolerance/sensitivity ), which is that when I stop excluding them, allow myself to eat them, they gradually take over my entire diet.

Fruit, vegetables, salad, nuts and fish, etc seem less and less interesting, in fact become a chore to eat, ( except as garnishes/sauce, eg. tomato ), when I am eating wheat and cheese etc. But when I exclude gluten and casein I find fruit, salad, veg, etc increasingly delicious and appealing and satisfying. I eat them spontaneously, with pleasure.

Does my addiction to language do the same thing? Does it turn me away from other activities; drawing, walking/exercise, sex, social contact, etc? Would these things seem more appealing, delicious, appetising, if I were not craving language all the time? Language as "drug" which makes everything else seem pale and uninteresting, ( and too much effort ).

The funny thing is that I suspect gluten and casein, ( either because of the constant gastro-intestinal discomfort they caused in infancy which made "being in" my body painful/distressing , or because of the food opioids in them ), of encouraging me to turn to language as vehicule of pleasure/satisfaction, like a computer game.
.

Last edited by ouinon on 05 May 2009, 1:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

anna-banana
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05 May 2009, 1:31 pm

I would have voted for the first option but you mentioned talking - talking I do not like that much. I have massive communication problems when talking. I mumble, have a hard time finding the right words, often am a bit slow with understanding what's been said to me.

but reading/writing I am totally addicted to.

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itsallrosie
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06 May 2009, 1:38 am

I would have voted Heavy but I'm not really interested in the language which can be difficult for me to express, I'm an information addict through and through which is why I read either printed or internet material almost constantly.

Language imparts information. I can live without language if I'm travelling in a new area as I am taking in information from the environment. Looking at documentaries, art or objects in a museum is also satisfying.

So I voted Other ... Information addict.

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Ambivalence
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06 May 2009, 2:30 am

I read constantly, anything, everything, any time, any place. I love etymology, the evolution of words through time and the interrelation between languages. I'm not sure that I'd call it an addiction, so much as it is a treatment for a problem; reading provides a focus for the attention, which I need.

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