2102: Seven Wonders

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Seven Wonders.”

“Khalil Gibran once said that people will never understand one another unless language is reduced to seven words. What would your seven words be?”

Regular readers will doubtless be aware that I require considerably more than seven words to get my point across in most situations, but this is an interesting question, regardless. What are the most fundamental things that you might need to communicate with other people? And, by extension, if those were the only things you were able to communicate, what effect might that have on your life?

A hasty answer to this question would consider fairly “obvious” words that reflect basic survival: food, drink, friend, dangerous, stop, help, run. Being forced to rely on words like that, though, would essentially put us on the level of primitive man: living for nothing more than basic survival and basic relationships with one another that boil down to people and things being good or bad. That, while a stable existence, would be rather dull.

So you could throw some words in there to spice things up a bit. Love. Hate. Sex. Kill. Although with those latter two in particular, you’re still not really operating on a level anywhere particularly beyond that of the cavemen.

But with only seven words to play with, how on Earth can you hope to make yourself understood? How could you possibly express yourself in all the many weird and wonderful ways humanity does today? These two things aren’t necessarily the same, since expressing yourself “clearly” does not necessarily mean that you’re being understood.

Well, then, you have to consider that not everything about communication involves words. Humanity can communicate with eye contact, with body language, with physical contact, with visual imagery, with music, with sound, with empathy, with sympathy. Consider the works of art that you might have indulged in that have no words as such: silent movies, instrumental pieces of music, visual art, dance recitals, even video games like Flower and Journey.

When you think about it that way, do we even need words at all? Well, yes, I think we probably do, since expressing the fact that you’re hungry entirely through a spectacular but ultimately impractical ballet performance is not really the most efficient way to go about things. But with the above in mind, what it does mean is that we could get by with a bare minimum of language to cover our basic needs — food, drink, friend, dangerous, stop, help, run, perhaps substituting “sex” for one of those depending on your attitude towards fornication — and the actual expressive side of communication could be handled entirely by non-verbal forms of art.

That would certainly be an interesting way to live, but to be honest, I think I like words too much to ever want to abandon them in that way. So don’t worry, dear reader; tomorrow’s post will be made up of more than the seven words I’ve proposed today. And I hope the words I choose will help you to understand me just a little bit more than the day before.