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Wednesday 9 July 2008

I know exactly what I mean. I just can’t think of the word for it

Matthew Parris's missing words

For written exchanges two people can be ‘correspondents’ with each other — but for verbal exchanges, there is no suitable equivalent. ‘Collocutor’ exists but sounds bizarre. The French have ‘interlocuteur/interlocutrice’ (‘personne qui converse avec une autre’) and though to our ears this sounds cumbersome, in France the word is apparently in vernacular use. Our own ‘interlocutor’ has a hopelessly pompous ring.

Rich in whole ranges of words for things, our tongue does have a few surprising gaps. Another is a word for ‘the person arguing or debating against’ someone. We have ‘protagonist’, but ‘antagonist’ will not serve as the flip-side, and ‘disputant’ is not quite right. Both these missing words would be, if they existed, particularly useful for journalists and for any writer who must make a report.

The 18th-century philosopher David Hume discussed at length whether we humans could ever conjure from our imagination a sensory perception we have not ourselves experienced — or, rather, whether everything we can imagine must be (or be constructed from) something we have experienced. Hume posited a colour-chart of shades of blue, from the palest to the deepest, with just one frame, one shade, missing. Could we imagine this, a colour we had never seen except in our mind’s eye? We can, for instance, imagine easily enough the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle, by interpolation from its surroundings.

There are some in the field of linguistic philosophy who, asking the comparable question — ‘Can we imagine a thing for which there is no word?’ — would answer strictly No. We struggle (they say) to think things for which we have no word or name. Such linguistical experts conclude that our language constrains what we are able to think.

This must be true up to a point. But I have a very clear idea of what it is I want the word for when I fumble for something like ‘co-conversationalist’ — as though in another life or a parallel world an English word does exist and I am reaching for it but (just) failing to grasp it. Purists in linguistic philosophy would reply that this is because we do have words from which we can construct the idea — ‘the person I was talking to’ — and so all we are seeking is a single-word shorthand way of condensing the existing meaning of a longer phrase or list.

But then again, while learning a foreign language we often come upon a word for which we don’t have a word at all, and yet we can sometimes get the feel for it at once, see how useful it is, and understand our lack.

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