Phrases of the sort “words fall short” and “it was indescribable” impute a fault to language that it has no responsibility to bear. Before going further, so as to establish a foundation on which to build, a premise all should find acceptable: the inability to convey an experience to another, to a degree that recreates the experience for the listener, is not a limitation of language. It is, rather, an implication of the physical impossibility of an experience being repeated (even the same events happening to the same person in the same location constitute a different experience because, at the very least, an increment of time has passed, and in that increment innumerable things have changed).

Most of those who utter phrases of the sort I indicated will find nothing disagreeable with the premise and, undaunted, will continue to defend their use, stating “It’s never my aim that the person I’m talking to should somehow defy the impossible and experience what I had, only that they should approach an imperfect understanding of it.” This, to me, seems a realistic goal, but I hasten to add that if, at the conclusion of the conveyance, the goal remains unrealized, the fault should not be attributed to language. It is not the fault of language that there are as many subtly different interpretations of a particular word as there are people who hear or read it, or that different people respond differently to the same diction and syntax, or even that its speakers may never know more than a fraction of its vocabulary.

If I’ve given the impression that language is in need of allies in its defense against disparaging phrases, best now to right the misaligned. No assistance is necessary, language is itself quite capable of fighting its own battles. Indeed, language is invincible to hostiles on account of an innate, impenetrable defense: any attempt to organize an attack against it would be circularly self-defeating because the communications facilitating an organized assault would represent a manifestation of the target. True, the world loses annually more languages than it gains, but language as a concept, as an institution, entrenches its roots evermore deeply into the evolution of our species, and we clutch it tenaciously, for it is the means by which we more fully become the social animals we are.

None of this serves to allay the discouragement of those who simply wished that the person they had spoken with might have approached an imperfect understanding of the experience they had related. To convince them that language is not to blame will hardly improve their spirits. Evidence of symmetry is perhaps the only consolation. Just as we can experience and conceive of things that we can’t communicate even imperfectly to others, we can communicate to others things we can’t conceive. Of the latter, the trivial cases are nonsensical statements such as “Trap-door estuary discernment critical” but also inconceivable are paradoxes and grammatically correct statements like this one from Bill Hicks “We are the imagination of ourselves.”