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Nouns
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 by joelI’ve been thinking about words. You know, the things that this particular article is entirely composed of. Those sounds or images we use to encode our thought processes, transmit them to other people, where they will be translated into whatever the heck the other person believes the meaning of is is.
Of course, I’m not entirely sure how much encoding actually occurs. Many of my thought processes are conversations in words that I hold with myself. One could even argue that rational thought would not be possible without words and we would be reduced to instinct-driven animals.
The Hebrew tradition holds that words are so powerful that God used a divine language to speak the world into creation, that the name of God was so powerful and sacred, it could not be spoken for fear of a slight mispronunciation that would put them in violation of the third commandment (the one about taking God’s name in vain). Some Hebrew scholars even believed that by inscribing the holy Hebrew words of life into the forehead of a clay statue they could mimic God’s act of bringing about human life out of dirt.
Whatever the powers of words may be, my years of schooling have taught me that not all words are created equal. There are wide assortments of word-types, but the type I wish to consider are nouns.
Nouns, they tell me, are people, places, or things. Sometimes ideas, as well, although one could argue that ideas are things. In fact, words are things. The word “word� is a noun. The word “noun� is also a noun. It is the only self-descriptive word type, though. Adjective is not, for instance, an adjective.
It is the fact that nouns are titles of ideas that I think might be misleading. After all, doesn’t everything start as an idea? I have an image in my mind when you say the noun “puppy�, but I also have an image when you say the verb “kick�. So it’s probably best to state that they describe things without also saying that they describe ideas. Because all things are ideas, but not all ideas are things.
