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Writer's pictureNilanjana

What Do Our Words Mean?

Updated: Jan 26, 2023

Words are strange, don’t you think? When you hear a language you don’t know, that is when it hits you the most. Without a particular historical or geographical context, words are just random sounds strung together that are supposed to mean something. And yet, this feeling of strangeness is completely absent when the words are from a language that you understand. Then, every word seems meaningful. Every arrangement of sound is impregnated with layers of meaning.


There’s the text or what the word means. There’s the subtext, or what the word is supposed to indicate, the connotations that we attach to certain words. And then there’s the context, or what the word means in that moment in which it is used. Every single day we use these words without stopping to think about the intricate web they form around us. The words that you know, are your only connection to the world around you. Without them, you are trapped within yourself.



Think for a moment that you are the last person on earth who speaks a certain language. Everyone else who knew it is dead and you do not know any other language. What would you do? How would it feel to have the rich, most beautiful, illustrative words in your vocabulary, and yet not being able to talk to anyone? I imagine you would roll the words around on your tongue, longing to use them again, gently whispering them into the emptiness, hoping against hope to hear them back in someone else’s voice.


Coming back to languages you know, there are those rare occasions when even known words seem alien. Like when you say a word too many times and it loses its meaning. It just becomes another garbled string of sounds and you wonder how you ever thought that it actually meant something. And for some time after that, you cannot make yourself say that word without thinking that there’s something definitely off with it.


At other times, there are words that make you feel what they mean. ‘Derelict’. The word conjures up an image of something that can’t stand straight, some that’s falling to pieces, crumbling right before you even as it tries hard to keep itself together. I always feel that this word tumbles off my tongue, the individual alphabets falling pel-mel on the floor, rolling away from each other before coming to rest. Does that happen to you, or is it just me?


Another word, or phrase rather, that I find very seductive is ‘bubbling brooks’. Every time I hear it, I am transported to this mountainside, with a sparkling stream passing over pebbles, making that distinct gurgling noise. It makes me want to be that stream that’s beginning its epic adventure. Somehow, that phrase means freedom to me.


All of this gets even more exciting when you know more than one language. Apart from English, I know Hindi and Bengali, and Assamese. These are languages concentrated in northern India, the east Indian state of West Bengal, and the northeast Indian state of Assam. My mother tongue is Bengali. I grew up in Assam, struggling to master Assamese. English and Hindi became my lingua franca since these were languages that everyone could understand.


I never had the chance to really associate with Bengali and Assamese. I can understand and speak both fluently. But I can’t read the script as easily as Hindi or English. And yet, there are Assamese and Bengali cultural influences I have grown up with. There are songs and poems I have learnt, stories I have heard. And from these pieces, I have picked up words that are incomparably beautiful. Words that sometimes have an English equivalent, sometimes don’t. But these words capture some ethereal beauty in the meaning, some magical feeling that its English translation just won’t convey.


There’s this Bengali word “kowasha” , which means fog. There’s the Assamese word “niyor” which means dew. Even though they have direct English translations, the fascination and mystery that I associate with fog and dew are only conveyed by these two words. The feeling that the fog can shroud a valley from view, bring about an eerie silence, is best evoked when I hear the word “kowasha”, not “fog”. Do you know words that make you feel that way or once again, is it just me?


Do you have any strange experiences with words? Do they sometimes make you stop and marvel at how impossibly beautiful they are?

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