One of the most important lessons I have learned as a student of literature and rhetoric is the value of diction. It allows a writer to put into words exactly what he or she means to express. Proper diction mitigates verbosity and ambiguity and is the hallmark of a cogent speaker and an effective wordsmith. Mark Twain’s wit, William Shakespeare’s eloquence, George Orwell’s sardonicism, and James Joyce’s brilliance are all attributable to their command of language through their diction. 

Gaining a holistic understanding of the intended meaning of a word is the best way to master its usage. In order to refine my diction I look up the etymology of a word I don’t know in addition to its definition and synonyms. However, researching etymology has led me to note that the imperfect foundation of my language makes it inherently imprecise. The fact that there is no logical grounding to the root words or methodology for creation or adoption of new words signifies a level of unavoidable ambiguity intrinsic to all traditional constructed language. Why do different words exist with identical meanings? Why can a single word can have multiple meanings? Why do we use idioms?

The implication of ambiguity in language is significant. The linguistic relativity principle, formerly the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, is the idea that “differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.” In other words, there is an element of feedback through which language influences thought. Why isn’t language as simple and precise as mathematics?

Some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians think that by digging deep into the underlying structure of our natural language (NL), We would (1) discover in greater detail the true logical forms of NL, (2) discover the irrelevant components of NL, (3) discover its underlying mathematical structures and show how NL quantifies the states of the world, and finally (4) construct a logically sound or consistent language with what is found in (1), (2) and (3). That the whole exercise is to use the newly derived Logically Consistent Language (LCL) to speak about and quantifies the states of the world in a way that avoids both nonsense and vagueness. So, clarity and elimination of the irrelevant from NL are presumably the ultimate goals of such a langauge. [source]

There have been many attempts to create a logically consistent language, the most well known of which is a language called Lojban. Lojban is a “constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic” and “designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication.” The official website lists the language’s claimed advantages as the following:

• Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
• Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
• Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
• Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
• Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
• Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
• Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
• Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
• Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.

Imagine the efficiency of a logically consistent language - the time that could be saved and all the misunderstandings that could be avoided. Take stereotypes - when put unambiguously, the statement “I dislike you because of my baseless, preconceived notions concerning the color of your skin” does not seem at all rational. According to the linguistic relativity principle, if one speaks logically, one is prone to think logically. Take computers - the reason computer programming languages were designed was because human languages were far too complex and uncertain to program a logical machine with.

But Lojban is not perfect, perhaps inherently so. Is a logically consistent language possible? Friedrich Nietzsche would’ve said no. He makes a compelling case in his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. I pulled these quotes which outline his ideas from the Wikipedia article on the essay:

Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.

Every word is a metaphor for an experience, a failed attempt to capture an experience. Thus language is

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

So Nietzsche asserts that language is poetry, which can be frustrating because it means I am trying to find an unambiguous way to convey myself in an ambiguous medium. But it also speaks to the brilliance of poetry - an art form that seeks to release the feelings and experiences that words represent.

I took a dedicated poetry class in my sophomore year of college, the same year I read Nietzsche’s essay. The professor kindled within me an appreciation for the art and played an important role in inspiring me to pursue English as one of my degrees. One of the most engaging parts of the class was trying to define poetry. “It’s like poetry” is a phrase used to describe something elegant. We can all recognize it, but it’s difficult to come up with a definition. What amused me was that after reading Nietzsche’s essay, I perceived that we were trying to use a metaphorical medium to precisely define something intentionally ambiguous. Taken from my class notes, below are several influential poets’ responses to the question “what is poetry?”

Pattiann Rogers (American poet, b. 1940): ”I believe that any good and valid poem is an an experience of words and sounds that shake the body and stun the senses, a real experience in the real world … It has being, a time and a space of its own.  It is not simply about a human experience, it is a human experience.”

Wiliam Wordsworth: ”Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”

William Butler Yeats: ”We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

M. L. Rosenthal [American literary critic]: “We cannot begin to grasp our inner sense of existence unless we bring the buried life of reverie, feeling, and dream into the foreground of consciousness, and somehow, connect it with the surface events of daily experience.”

William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult / to get news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there. ” (“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”)

Yang Wan-Li (Chinese poet, 12th c.): “If you say that poetry is simply a matter of words, I will say, ‘A good poet gets rid of words.’  If you say it is simply a matter of meaning, I will say, ‘A good poet gets rid of meaning.’  But, you will say, if words and meaning are gotten rid of, where is the poetry?  To this I reply, ‘Get rid of words and meaning and there is still poetry.’ “

Claribel Alegria [contemporary Salvadorian poet]: “Sometimes I hear music haunting me, and then I have to fill that music with words.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Poetry strips the veil of familiarity from things.”

Edward Hirsch [contemporary American poet and critic]: “We ought to speak more often of the precision of poetry, which restores the innocence of language, which makes the language visible again.  The lyric poem defamiliarizes words, it wrenches them from familiar or habitual contexts, it puts a spell on them.”

Ranier Marie Rilke [German poet, 1875-1926]: “Poems are not, as people think, simply emotions—they are experiences.  For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things; you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.  You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor.  But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises.  And yet it is not enough to have memories.  Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst arises.”

Diane Ackerman [American poet and naturalist]: “Poetry is the Morse Code of the heart.”