Language Limitations

Our lives have been filled with experiences. From the moment our lives began we have been seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and doing things. Life is full of experiences; they are never-ending and always happening. Even if you are simply sitting on at a desk bored out of your mind you are living an experience. Everyone’s experiences are different and personal, and it is because of this that language, no matter how sophisticated, will never be able to capture the entire picture of the lives we live.
Think about a time where you had a feeling that you couldn’t put into words. You know what happened and how you felt, but there weren’t words even close enough to describe the event to even yourself. Whether it was a feeling of extreme loss, joy, surprise, or accomplishment you had to “tone down” the experience to fit into a category defined by language. It was only after you put this experience into a category, predetermined by the boundaries of our language, that you could comprehend what happened and transmit that feeling or thought to other people.
Despite the fact that our lives are an amazing composition of events, feelings, and emotions, the capacity of our language defines how we view the world. Take for example the variation between a horrible moment and an exciting, happy moment. When something happens in our life there is a scale between these two feelings, and this scale possesses an infinite number of levels. However, because language limits how we could describe a circumstance, the way we feel about a situation is limited to a relatively small number of increments. You might come home from work and tell your spouse, “I had a bad day at work.” The experiences at work that happened to define it as a “bad day” have a range. Without question, the reasons you had a bad day at work this week are different than the reasons you had a bad day at work last month; however, due to the limitations set upon us by language both days and both experiences were interpreted as bad. We can try to be more descriptive with our words and stories, but the range of feelings associated with experiences, which in theory are infinite, are actually categorized into distinct levels depending on the words we have to describe them.
It is for reasons like this that language will never capture the enormity of experience. Our lives are so diverse and eventful that it would be impossible to invent a language that is able to capture and describe each and every one of our experiences. This language would not be understood by all members of a society; it would only be understood by the individual who lived the life the language is designed for. Language helps us communicate with others, but in reality we are telling them something that is categorized, not specified. When we tell someone “I enjoyed the concert last night”, they adapt that to their own experiences, and truly will never know how you felt about the concert. Language limits our experiences to the boundaries created by it.