How can words be beautiful?
Atticus Dewe
Words can come in many forms; they are seen, spoken, written, printed, or from a screen, decoded from a string of positives and negatives, transmitted around the world. In this essay, I will attempt to show that words are beautiful in all forms, but first, I would have to define what beauty means in this essay. To be beautiful, to me, is to be aesthetically or mentally pleasing, and I think words do this, in two ways: words have the unique ability to please the mind, but also become a symbol of their cultures, their history, in their physical and sonic characteristics, and this pleases the brain on both a physical and mental level. To explain my first point, I would say that humans have an innate yearning for knowledge and are designed to learn. This can be seen in a young child (who could be seen to exemplify the true human nature, having not yet built up a library of experience and trauma that might twist their innate characteristics and lead them to think they detest learning), in that a young child’s one objective is to learn through osmosis from their surroundings, gradually expanding there linguistic, social, and broader understanding. While I would concede that this appetite for knowledge decreases with age as the void of knowledge is filled, I do believe that until a person has lost their ability to fully comprehend or think for any number of reasons, everyone is drawn to the act of learning, even if they do not consciously realize it. This is because, as social animals, humans have been able to become dominant in the world only through the civilization, resulting from agriculture, that has transformed us from scattered hunters and gatherers to beings that explore other planets, the civilization which relies on a majority of a group actively trying to solve their problems using language,. Furthermore, as social animals, even the knowledge of personal relationships, more crudely seen as gossip, is something we could all admit to being drawn to. Therefore, if one were to accept my argument for how the human brain is pleased and drawn to learning, then it easy to see that knowledge is beautiful. However, the reason this shows the beauty of words is that, if the mind is pleased by knowledge, then knowledge must somehow reach the brain; I believe words are beautiful because they uniquely allow knowledge to spread across space and time, therefore allowing the brain to be pleased. I believe this because, for information to spread, words are the only real solution. While an image is initially useful – you can teach someone to perform a physical act, be it till a field, or assemble a piece of Ikea furniture – , the unique value of words is in that which cannot be literally drawn. Imagining, let alone drawing, the concept of time, or emotion, or freedom, in anything more than a surface level rendition limited to human perception, proves an impossible task. This shows a flaw in a world without words: ideas cannot travel beyond the limits of the physical world and human experience, limiting the ability to create, learn or discover. Conversely, with words, you can expand a society into new ideals, new directions, and new prosperity.
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