Disjointed thoughts on aging and words

By Bobby Neal Winters

After a certain age, old men start learning anatomy. This is not the crude anatomy of their youths when they referred to family anatomy in Anglo-Saxon words, but a more refined anatomy using Latin words and acronyms for Latin phrases like meniscus and ACL.  Those who are interested in sports might learn these earlier, but these words come to all of us eventually.

We have conversations with our friends and when we talk about the nerve bundle that is being pinched around L5 and S1, our friends either nod knowingly or listen intently, trying to prepare themselves for the days to come.  There are some that even talk with authority about surgeries, having pins put in their C4 or C5.

Jesus said that the very hairs of our head were numbered, so that is surely so, but our vertebrae most assuredly are. 

We learn about what interests us, and we talk about it, and to talk about it we have to have the language.  That last clause is worth repeating even though it's obvious:  We have to have words if we are going to talk about something.This goes for anatomy, science in general, mathematics, music, and so on.  Anything you talk about you’ve got to have the words.

God has his words for things, but God’s words are the things themselves.  We as humans make our words to talk about his thing.  We want to talk about vertebrae, so we separate them into categories depending upon where they are in the body: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral.  Then we number those. Our ability to name things is something we have in common with God.

Numbering is a very scientific thing to do.  When we number something, it just sounds more scientific.  The numbering on the vertebrae is all about order rather than quantity.  The C1 vertebrae is at the top and the C7 is at the bottom; they could’ve named them C-Sunday through C-Saturday and it would have accomplished the same purpose, but then they would’ve had to come up with 12 things in order for the thoracic, so forth.  So numbers.

Having named a thing makes us feel like we’ve got a handle on it.  We can talk about it; we can use our words to make plans: “We are going to go in and trim that bone spur you got down around L5 and S1.”  But with humans the words are not the thing itself.  I cannot just fix my back by talking.  Someone with knowledge--and probably a big boat moored a short distance from his lake house--has to go in and fiddle with the actual thing itself. 

Some folks are so good with manipulating language--have such “verbal virtuosity” in the words of Thomas Sowell--they forget there is reality. Reality is a place that has consequences.  You can say that you can fly, but if you jump off the top of a skyscraper in only your street clothes you will make the headlines but not like Superman.  You can say you are a bird, but that doesn’t mean you can fly.

Human language has its limits, but those limits are blessings because they forced us as a species to create art. There are movies that can portray what words cannot convey. Music can transmit feelings over distance and time.  Poetry can capture reality in ways that straight-forward prose cannot.  These are all forms of language, but we struggle within them. 

They can be powerful, however. Metaphor--to a prepared mind--can convey in a short phrase what would take reams of paper to tell otherwise, e.g. “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching , covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”  We have there in a few lines a full portrait of the man.

Sometimes we talk around the things that we cannot say out loud because we think life is too short to spend it arguing.  We speak out little truth and leave it to the wisdom of the listener--or the reader--to figure it out. 

Well, it is time to get on with the rest of the day.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )