Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.”

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn’t hurt anymore: that’s my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”

when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe.”

He showed me all about sentences and paragraphs—did you know the emotion unit in writing is the paragraph?—and how to separate what you can say from what you can imply, and when to do one or the other—” She stopped. “Then he’d give me a manuscript and say, ‘Now you tell me what’s wrong with the words.’ The only thing I could ever find was that there were too many of them.

If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn’t the proper form, you don’t have the how even if you have the words.

An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented.

Thinking in Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing all the way down through water to the bottom of a well that a moment ago you’d thought was only a few feet deep. She reeled with vertigo.

“Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don’t know the words, you can’t know the ideas. And if you don’t have the idea, you don’t have the answer.”

In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist.