"Looks just like a patchwork quilt, doesn't it?"
Poirot, who dislikes small airplanes and small ships and anything, really, that goes up and down, refuses to look out the window. Eyes squeezed shut, he pronounces, "Non!"
"Well," Hastings says, "it does to me. It does to anyone else."
"Not to Poirot!"
"I suppose you don't think that [the clouds] look like a mass of cotton wool."
"Non!"
"It does to anyone else" is how humans manage to communicate. We decide that "X" is called a certain thing, making it possible for us to overcome the gap between Person A's understanding of X and Person B's understanding of X.
The criticized yet beloved Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Darmok" takes this too far. But it underscores a valid point. Picard and the Tamarian captain learn to communicate by moving in the opposite direction to Hastings. The communication, "There's a monster" is only made possible after the men have shared individual stories about monsters.
It is difficult to imagine any language continuing this way ("There's a monster" is so much easier and results in a lot less death) but the underlying point is valid: a common currency must exist. X needs to be recognizable to at least a majority of "everybody elses."
Picard luckily knows his mythology.
Ah, a good reason to teach mythology! Be ready for when the aliens arrive!
1 comment:
Cliches are often, though not always, cliches because they are good descriptors.
That episode of ST:NG may have been inspired by a chapter from Gene Wolfe's science fiction series The Book of the New Sun. There is a storytelling contest between a group of soldiers and one prisoner from a totalitarian society. In the totalitarian society, everyone is only allowed to speak in quotations from the books that the ideology of the society is based on. (It's mentioned that the very young are excluded from this rule, though.) Think if everyone could only communicate by quoting Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto. Wolfe has the prisoner construct a story that, while ambiguous, can be considered critical of the totalitarian society with the same quotes that are the basis of the society. Wolfe's point, I think, is that even if language is controlled there would be some level of free thought.
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