Thanks, tsuwm, for the link.
Yes, those compartments do help us order thought--and do help us understand each other better if we're trying to understand each other. And I welcome those times that someone has provided insight so that I could break a compartment down and throw it away to make room for a new one that did the job better. If we want to grow in understanding, don't we beg to have our fondest theories challenged and proven to be incorrect?
Language is, at least, convenient. It works; gets the job of communication done in many, perhaps countless, instances.
But not all. The biggest problem I see in restricting our comprehension to language is that omission of the emotional response--that response that is nearly entirely unrelated to language. I'm not talking about emotional response to anything that involves language, such as poetry or the evening news, but emotional response to life itself beyond words. Spring is here. Dead would be the heart that cannot respond to its unfolding. Yesterday I was downtown Richmond, walking by the enormous equestrian monument of General Robert E. Lee, and passed a man with electric clippers clipping away at boxwoods. The smell of wet grass hit me full force in the warm air, and I felt like bursting into tears, the greenness of the scent so overcame me with pure pleasure. The experience was immediately emotional and unrelated to language. In describing the experience to you, I take you into the event by setting the scene. I use language to take you there so you'll understand where I was and what was going on when the scent of wet grass hit me. But my language had nothing to do with my strong emotional response. It was simply the grass and the scent and my receptivity at that moment to the scent.
My experience--who I am and how I build language--has one wing eternally flapping in the Emotional; the other flaps in the Intuitive. I wonder how Sapir and Whorf accounted for the emotions and intuition having forceful influences in making us who we are?
