About Absurdity

Attempting to Accept Ambivalence:

Absurd. According to Merriam-Webster, it is an adjective that means:
 

1. ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous; extremely silly or ridiculous

2. having no rational or orderly relationship to human life: MEANINGLESS; lacking order or value

3. dealing with the absurd or with absurdism
    

and also a noun that means:

1. the state or condition in which human beings exist in an irrational and meaningless universe and in which human life has no ultimate meaning —usually used with the.

(Thank you, Merriam-Webster, for clarification. Articles, especially the, is one of the most bewildering enemies of English non-natives.)
 

/æbˈsɝd/, /æbˈzɝd/, /əbˈsɝd/, /əbˈzɝd/.

‘A’ being pronounced as either near-open front unrounded vowel /æ/, like ‘a’ as in ‘apple,’ or as mid central vowel /ə/ (schwa, my beloved–), like ‘a’ as in ‘ability.’

‘S’ being pronounced as either voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/, like ‘s’ as in ‘sap’, or as voiced alveolar fricative /z/, like ‘z’ as in ‘zap.’ The only difference between them is the vibration of the vocal cord (‘z’ should make your vocal cord vibrate when making that sound while ‘s’ shouldn’t, so let your vocal cord, not your heart or brain, decide.) 

And that is merely one example of the absurdity of the English language: Just what is wrong with pronunciation of “ou” in tough, though, thought, through, and throughout (plus boulevard and Houston)? Why is it “rats” if there are more than one rat, but “mice” instead of “mouses” if there are more than one mouse? Why do we say “kids are playing IN the park,” and “kids are playing IN the yard,” but “kids are playing AT the playground?” How can “bass” mean a big ugly fish and a low-pitched sound, and the only way to differentiate those definitions are their pronunciations? What is the point of the existence of the word “sanction” that means both penalty and permission? How can you read “Worcestershire” as “woost-er-sher” if it is written nothing like that? Why do we add “the” for movies (“I watched the movie”) but not for televisions (“I watched TV”)? What if you’re watching the movie from TV? 

However, the greatest absurdity of a language is not being simultaneously logical and illogical, but being inconspicuous to the natives of that language. I assume most of you reading this are native English speakers (and monolinguals), so I’ll ask you this: When did you begin to suspect that something is just not right with your mother tongue? Was it the time your elementary school teacher corrected your pronunciation while you were reading a book out loud, but you could not match whatever sound they made to the word you read? Or was it when the middle school English teacher made you identify the part of speech of a word or independent clauses from a sentence? Or was it the good old college admission days, when you were taking dozens of SAT or ACT practice exams and suddenly engulfed in a blazing desire to fight whoever wrote the English test sections?

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that the worldview or cognition of an individual is influenced by the structure of the language they speak, can be a possible explanation to this unnoticeable absurdity of a language. English natives, whose perception is hardwired to English, cannot easily detect the illogicality of the language, and even if they do, they do not question it deeply, for their brain has accepted it as being logical at the earlier moment of their life. 

And that is the point where the splendor of being multilingual comes in–possessing multiple souls, each shaped by a different language, opens up your eyes and ears to the world that others cannot see and hear, and allows you to perceive the world in various angles and acquire a deeper understanding of it. 

However, even multilingualism possesses an absurdity that cannot be overcome. Each soul does not retain a distinct worldview; they influence others and create a unique soul that is built upon a fusion of multiple languages. In addition, no two people are going to develop the same worldview, even if they speak the same language, for the language is not the only factor that determines conception. The knowledge of a language does not grant an automatic understanding of intrapersonal and interpersonal influences that the speaker of that language has been exposed to. Perhaps that is the most fundamental absurdity that involves a language–complete comprehension is impossible, even when the tool of comprehension exists and is called language. 

If we cannot overcome the language barrier and thus inevitably fail to fully understand the world, then we should open up our minds to embrace the unknown, the absence of knowledge, and the absurdity. By knowing what we do not know, we know what to know. And we know what we do not know by giving absurdity, whose nature is amorphous, a defined form via textualization. When put into text to convey meanings, absurdity becomes simultaneously comprehensible and incomprehensible, hence reaching its greatest significance, the greatest absurdity. 

So when an inspiration walked to me – an uncommon yet unprecedented phenomenon for creators – dressed as theatre of the absurd and adorned with multilingual accessories, I took its hand and waltzed across the hall of imagination, immersing myself in the symphony of subconsciousness and cacophony of consciousness, and ultimately let the duet be my capstone project for WRITING 420 class in the University of Michigan. We danced on the stage called absurdity, twirling to transform linguistics – the science of language – into the art of language and to distort the science of identifying a linguistic order from a disorder into the art of creating a linguistic disorder from an order. 

After all, such is the beauty of being a writer, is it not?