I have a friend who has a cat named Mouse. I have been with Mouse many times, tweaked his whiskers, stroked his luxurious mouse gray coat, tugged his tail. Sometimes when the cat named Mouse appears he isn’t there. Not actually. Not as a flesh and blood tangible cat. Rather, my friend conjures up a linguistic verbal cat by the tongue-wag-wand magic of language. My friend tells a cat tale. When he does, I can see Mouse, almost, watch his hijinks leap to the table, hear the crash of the coffee cup smash on the floor,
With language humans become weavers of worlds. Our minds, using words, weave a conscious tapestry before which we live. The bigger the vocabulary, the bigger, deeper, richer the world.
- Language is a construction kit for building a representational world parallel to the actual world. Language represents, re-presents, the real world in symbolic form. With language we can construct a world out of sounds and certain marks, a print or spoken copy of the actual.
- With language we can generate new interpretations of the phenomenon we experience.
- Language is a method of moving through space/time, past and future, here and there.
- Language is a method of transporting ideas from one mind to another.
- Language allows us to review [re-view] the world, to hold the world away from, so we can take another position and claim another insight.
- Language allows us to construct an alternative world, a dream world, an imaginative world, a fictional world, a world we can build.
- Poetry is playfully powerful form of language, integrating meaning, sound, image into a linguistic event which reorders the world and offers us a different experience.
Example: calling a cat Mouse.