Should it stay or should it go

One incredible property of time is that it changes literally everything: some things change very slowly, to the point that we perceive them as immutable, whereas others change very quickly or even reverse their previous changes, establishing themselves in cycles. In fact, change is so intrinsic to time that we use it to define time: according to the International System of Units, a second is equal to the duration of a number of vibrations in an atom of cesium-133. The reason why this particular atom was chosen back in 1967 is that it emits only in one frequency and that all the cesium-133 atoms are identical, so they do not "contaminate" the signal with other frequencies. So, in a sense, this vibration is a change that does not change. Go figure the irony.

Surprisingly this kind of effects only applies to the material world, to objects composed of atoms, which can gain and lose energy and are therefore subject to the influence of entropy, the natural trend of enclosed systems to reach a state of disorder. That is how we define the arrow of time, the direction of flow, where things go from whole to broken, and not the other way around. However, ideas and concepts are not subject to this kind of effects: the number 2, for instance, is a constant and will always be. It will not suffer inflation or change value, it will always be twice as much as 1 and half of 4. It has different names in the different languages around the world and it is even possible that some cultures do not have a number 2, but in all cultures that have it its meaning is the same. And the same applies to all ideas: when you write a word in a piece of paper, the ink might fade, the paper might rot, but as long as the material substrate stands the word will be identical to the moment you wrote it.

Photo: Kerim Friedman

Comparing the constant change of the material reality with the immutability of ideas and concepts quickly shows a very serious problem of incompatibility. If things change, how can we label them with the same name? If a person grows, or goes bald, cuts their hair short or simply moves from one end of the room to the other, they have changed, but we clearly understand that they are the same person. This is was we call abstraction, a mental process of induction by which we conclude that, even if the person moved across the room, most of their properties remain unchanged, so the concept of them as a person is still valid.

The next question, of course, is when a change is big enough to change the essence of the object, to justify a change of name. For instance, if we drop a cup and it breaks, it would be legitimate to argue that the result is not a cup anymore, just shards or, at most, the pieces of a cup, but it would certainly not serve the usual purpose of a cup. Depending on the number of pieces, it could be possible to restore the cup to its function by gluing the pieces together, what would, once again, legitimate a change of name. The immediate effect of the constant changes in the real world is that we have to constantly revisit the ideas we have to establish their validity or update them when necessary.

However, updating our ideas is a lot of mental work and in fact our memory quickly starts to make errors if we have contradicting memories about a given object. If you put your keys in two different places, you might have a hard time remember where was the last place you put them, because the memory of putting them in either place can be equally vivid. And the same applies to almost any activity we perform. How many times I drove off with the idea to go shopping, only to find myself halfway to the office thanks to my "autopilot"?

The difficulty to change means that we have a very strong incentive to keep things the way they are, because they are known to us and we are used to deal with them. This applies in the same way to our language or any other cultural device: they are neither good nor bad, they are simply convenient at a given time, but there is no intrinsic value in its existence. The value of a painting or a poem lies on how much we can relish on its contemplation, not in the fact that they are cultural artifacts. Organized crime, sexism and war are also cultural artifacts and there is little doubt that they are not "good", they are just a consequence of how our societies work.

From this point of view, the efforts of every type of preservation effort required a hard evaluation: what is the value of a landscape, an animal species, a religious practice, a word in a language? Why are they worth preserving? Dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago and, precisely thanks to that extinction, mammals had a chance to thrive and eventually become the humans that have now taken over the world. If there had been a conservation effort (by whatever means, bear with me) back then we would simply not be here.

The same process happens with languages as well: if the monks in the middle ages had had the means to teach proper Latin to the popular classes and enforce a proper use, we would not have English, or French, or Spanish. Would the world have been better or worse? It is hard to say, but it would certainly be different. It has certainly been advantageous to be able to keep record of cultures past (just consider how helpful the Rosetta stone has been in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs), but that does not necessarily imply that we should stick with them. In a sense, preservation does not have to be the same as continuation.

I came to think about this idea after I listened to this episode of NPR's podcast Rough Translation, where the host, Gregory Warner, and international English teacher Heather Hansen discuss the difficulties that many non-native speakers have to adapt not so much the language in itself, but the particular sub-set that we usually call "idiomatic expressions" or "idiom" for short. The problem is that many of these expression only make sense in a certain cultural environment, which some foreigners are unlikely to have. Just consider an American saying "you are as hopeless as Nixon in the Watergate": unless you know that this makes reference to the Watergate Scandal, that lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the comparison would be totally lost to you. And this is not an established expression: there others like "pulling the plug", "calling it a day" and many, many other that are fully consolidated in the vocabulary of most native speakers but, due to their nature, foreigners cannot comprehend even if they are able to understand the literal meaning of the expression.

Under these circumstances, Hansen strongly advocated not so much for teaching these expressions to foreigners, which a daunting task, as to teach native speakers not to use them in international environments. In other words, when considering saying along the lines "this is your third strike, you're out", native speakers should be aware of the cultural requirements (in this case baseball) that the expression imposes, and choose instead with something more neutral such as "this is already your third error, we are not giving you another opportunity", which can be interpreted at face value, just understanding the words is enough to get the meaning of the overall sentence.

This is, once again, a conflict between preservation and progress: using a less idiomatic English would certainly simplify the access to it for many foreigners, but only at the expense of the cultural richness that is carried in all these expressions as a hole. In fact, each one of these figurative expressions is like a little poem, a short example of how someone thought that twisting the language a little bit could make it more expressive and colorful. As many other cultural devices, it is great to admire the ingenuity of the human species but that does not mean that they are essential for the language as a tool. So while idioms are totally welcome for domestic use, it should be clear for all native speakers that these expressions are not welcome in international environments and therefore they should go now. Business meetings are bound to be (even) less colorful, but you can always head to the Karaoke once the meeting is done for the day and discuss, in front of the microphone, if the idioms should stay or should go to the tune of the 1981 song by The Clash. Have a nice weekend.