The impact of popular culture

Reviewing the entries from last week (and also older ones), I have realized that some of them bear titles taken from popular songs and that had me wondering why. After giving it some thought, I have reached the conclusion that it is the free association at play: when I am rummaging about a certain subject I might build a sentence that reminds me of a song, and then I start thinking of the song, its lyrics, the artist and their life, triggering a whole stream of thoughts parallel to the original one. Of course, this is not limited to songs: movies, books, travels, jokes, all can induce similar effects when your mind is open to finding new connections.

In the end, it is not much different than putting words together in general: when we speak we select the most suitable word from our lexicon, and some groups of words turn to come out together, like "white as snow" or "not touch it with a barge pole", because they have a particular meaning, more than the sum of the individual words. The songs, books, and other elements in the popular culture also contain additional meaning, so they can be evocative of richer ideas than the words themselves, and if the meaning is shared among a social group (or the whole western society), it is not a problem to use them as vehicles of communication.

Photo: Ylanite Koppens from PxHere

To some extent, one might think of these cultural elements as extensions to the vocabulary. They are, in strict sense, multimedia: a song is not just the music, but also the lyrics, and sometimes also the visual aspect of the music video associated to it; a movie is not only the story, but also the faces of the actors, the costumes, the locations, the score. With this depth, it should not be a surprise to anyone that they provide for very rich containers of meaning, thereby extending our expressive capabilities. Creativity always contains ultimately some amount of copy (or steal), so the richer the sources, the more abundant the number of possible combinations.

It is remarkable however that our language capabilities do not strictly limit our thoughts. For several decades in the last century linguists followed the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (also called linguistic relativity), which posits that humans cannot imagine concepts for which they do not have a word, but this has been long disproved. The "weak" version of it states that the language influences the way we think: depending on the language we speak, we pay attention to different aspects of the world, but this is not deterministic, it does not prevent us from looking at other aspects if we need to.

A beautiful example of this case is the existence of color blue: with the exception of Ancient Egyptians, which had readily access to indigo dye and therefore had the need for a word to describe the color, most civilization start by developing words for black and white, then red appears to describe blood or wine, and only later yellow and green (in various orders), but in most cases blue is a late comer. Remarkably, the color of the sky has not changed in ten thousand years, but in many languages only in the last five hundred has there been a word to accurately describe its color. Probably because it is linked to air, and air is obviously transparent, thinking of the color of sky was... unusual.

One surprising case of how language influences the focus of our attention is the aboriginal language of the Guugu Ymithirr in Queensland, Australia. To describe relative positions the do not use words like left or right, ahead or behind; instead they use cardinal points. If you are looking north and I am in front of you, I am north of you, but if you then turn around I will still be north of you. To be able to speak in that way, they have to keep an internal compass of where the directions are, the dedicate some of their attention to keep track of all the turns they take so that they internal compass does not get misaligned.

So next time that you find yourself at a loss for words, keep in mind that it is not an excuse for not being able to think straight. And, if anything else fails, you can always try to find a fitting song. Have a nice evening.