Under My Skin

The Eskimos have 50 words for snow. Ancient Persian has 80 words for love. English has about 20 words for cocaine. And there's a kind of flavor in Korean that none of these languages has a word for: 고소하다 (Gosohada) - meaning the flavor that can be found in sesame oil, milk, Swiss cheese and peanuts. This was what a Korean exchange student told me last week when he was eating a club sandwich he bought from the school canteen. It is hard for me to imagine what gosohada tastes like, because I am Chinese, and there isn't a word in Chinese that describes it. But after being told that there was something called gosohada, I was starting to become aware of this flavor in the food that I ate.

Does the flavor gosohada exist before there's a word for it or does it exist just because someone created it? In English, we use the word "turquoise" to describe the bluish green color. But before it was English, we didn't have a word for that; we just described the color as bluish green with a bit of aqua mixed with gray. That's because "turquoise" was actually a word borrowed from French. Perhaps the French were more artistic than the Englishmen, so they needed more specific terms to describe colors, who knows? What I'm trying to say is, gosohada exists before there's a word for it - it's just that the flavor isn't considered in some cultures. Consequently, if something was named, we would know that its importance was considerably high in a specific culture. And I wondered how important something can be for it to be acknowledged in all languages and even named after 80 different words in ancient Persian.

All this information was taught in my Linguistics class at university. Sometimes the professor would tell us the origin of a word and try to analyze how culture makes it become what it is today. I'm not a language nerd. Comparatively speaking, I'm more keen on literary studies. But this course certainly brings me to see the world through a different scope and shows me how closely or scarcely I am related to others. Realizing how limited our range of knowledge can span amazes me and terrifies me and frustrates me, because it constantly makes me question and re-evaluate my own identity. If I spoke Korean or some other languages, how would I see the world and its people around me? How would I end up with all the different choices I make every day?

If you have studied Semantics before, you'll grasp the idea that even in the same language and culture, different people have different references of what a word means. For instance, when reading the word "cricket", the first image that flashes across some people's minds would be the little green insect while for others, it would be cricket the sport. Even for the same thing, the result would turn out differently. Take "lecture" for example. When the professor thinks of "lecture", it depicts the scenario of him standing in front of all his students. And when we, students, think of the same word, we would picture ourselves sitting in class listening to the speaker. This is where it struck me. It disturbs me to realize that one would never understand another because we exist in different realities, in our own little planets that no one could ever trespass. And the thing that agitates me the most is that I will never be understood.

As a writer, I have this constant compulsion to express. There's so much under my skin that urges to break free, but I am not gifted enough to convey what I want to convey and I wish that I knew all the right languages for the right things to say. But then it would require someone who knew all these languages to understand what I meant. Throughout the lecture I was drafting my article but I struggled with words to write, because when I intended to say one thing it might turn out to be something completely different for someone else to comprehend. While I am a person who seeks quality communication and mutual understanding, I am slowly finding it difficult to open up to people around me. And this is wearing me out because the one person that I want to talk to the most seems like he's refusing to let me in. It makes me wonder if I am isolating myself or being isolated. And language has never been so un-obliging as it ought to be a tool for communication when in this case it is driving people away.

Right after finishing my milk pudding, I took out the lecture notes on which I drafted my article. Compositional Semantics was right beside my clumsy handwriting. It says that putting words together in order can alter the meaning of a word. And I thought of why I started taking up writing as a hobby when I was younger. These words are just words on their own, but a chunk of them makes them unique in their own ways. How I arrange them in my choice of sequence is greater than the words on their own. With the aftertaste of gosohada in my throat, I recalled the professor's external reference to the definition of Compositional Semantics - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

While in ancient Persian there're 80 words for love, I haven't yet found a single word for you. But under my skin, I am greater than what I cannot express. And under my skin, the whole of me can drown out a river.