the indescribable
“The word is the servant only of unreal communications,” writes Robert Musil in his diaries, “as soon as we speak, doors close.” William Burroughs makes a similar claim when he says, “to speak is to lie.” Less philosophically, countless other writers are partial to invoking the inadequacy of words while in everyday speech one constantly hears the refrain, “Words fail me,” and the defeated modifiers “indescribable,” “ineffable” and “incommunicable.” Personally, I have never understood either this lofty contempt for language or the presumption of its fundamental inadequacy and it is not because I am never lost for words. It is because I believe that there is nothing that cannot be expressed in words and that, just at the sum of possible numbers that inhere in our number system is either equal to or greater than the sum of possible quantities encountered in the universe, so the sum of possible texts that inhere in a given language is greater than or equal to the sum of possible human experiences. The experience of being lost for words, in short, indicates a limitation in the speaker or writer and not a limitation of language. If the difficulty of the description exceeds our powers of expression the blame should be placed there: You fail words. Otherwise it merely indicates that we need to try harder, read more, or buy a bigger dictionary... At the risk of sophistry, I think it is also worth pointing out that the word “indescribable” itself does, paradoxically, describe.
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