esa lengua celestial

so while evading work today I came across this article…. which, interesting as it is in terms of its localization-of-function bent, really caught my eye because of this word:

an·o·mie or an·o·my  
n.

1. Social instability caused by erosion of standards and values.
2. Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals: “We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie and rage� (Charles Krauthammer).

 

Now… perhaps this word shouldn’t have been new to me, but it was, so deal with it. It also exists in adjectival form, i.e. anomic. Which brings us to another word: anomia, which shares the same adjectival form. Anomia, however, refers to word-finding difficulty, often the result of some type of brain injury. Basically, imagine having that tip-of-the-tongue problem….. ALL the time.

ambiguity just always catches my eye. and makes me think about patterns and parallels. how much of morality/values resides in our language? or is reinforced by our language? If the whorfian style of thinking is true and our language constrains our thoughts/beliefs, then does the loss of language lead to to some loss of morality? I.e. does being anomic (in the a-without, nomen-name way) result in one becoming anomic (in the a-without, nomos-law way)?

Severe anomia can result in the inability to form unambiguous statements… people lose their content words and start saying things like ‘well the man who wore the thing gave the thing to the man who put the thing on the thing.’…. what happens to ethics and reason when you can’t form sentences? I don’t doubt that it’s possible to reason non-verbally, but we’re certainly not trained to do it much, being such a verbal species.

HM.