Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

A bit of cross-pollination, this week.

I was intrigued by a blog post from the always-interesting candidkay, in which she detailed the selection for her word for the year: “wonder.”

Wonder—as in “sense of wonder” rather than “Hmm . . . I wonder . . .”—has long been a thing encouraged in my household. We love it. I mean, there are phenomena in this world that are just so . . . wonderful . . . that they make me glad to be alive.

I have some tried-and-true sources for “sensawunda.” Watching a cephalopod change the color and texture of its skin in the blink of an eye. Standing in the middle of a Gothic cathedral and looking up at tons of stone that hang above me, all lifted by human hands, all suspended by the power of physics. Seeing the spirals amid the seeds of a sunflower or embedded in a sectioned nautilus shell, and recognizing the mathematics (which I poorly understand) that predict each rank, each row, each curve.

Recently, though, I hadn’t experienced that sensawunda—life has been filled with too much of the pedestrian and mundane of late—and I had actually forgotten how lovely a few moments of wonderment can be.

And then, just as I was ruing that lack, I was struck by a thing I hadn’t thought before, a thing that made me go ooooh, that is so cool.

Glance back up at the post so far. Up to this paragraph, it had around two hundred twenty-five words. Did you have to look up any of those words? Have you ever had to look up most of those words?

I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet you intuited that candidkay was a blogger’s name. I’ll bet you either knew a cephalopod was a mollusk like an octopus, or you guessed it from context. And as for the neologism “sensawunda,” I’ll bet you immediately knew it was a mashup of “sense of wonder.”

Think of all the words you know, all up there in your brain, and try to estimate how many of them you have never had to look up in a dictionary. Thousands and thousands of words that you simply know. Your brain has picked them up through context, through intuition, through the social transmission of information. An apple is a thing, the fruit of a tree, but it’s also a class of things, and also a representation of a thing or a class of things, and also a metaphor for a representation. When we talk about politics, you know what the word means, even though you’ve probably never looked it up or had it defined to you. In fact, there are words you know, words you use correctly, for which you’ve probably never stated a definition. There may be words you use daily that, if asked, you would have a hard time defining. And yet, you know those words; they come to you and you pick them up. Your brain, thirsty for descriptions and tools for understanding the world, soaks them up like a sponge.

Language—written, spoken, signed—has to be the greatest innovation in our history as a species, and it is so integral to our experience that it’s actually hard-wired into our brains.

Think about it. A sound represents a thing. We can scribble some lines that represent that sound and, by extension, that thing. We can devise a series of gestures and signs that represent the sound or an analog of the thing.

These words written here are thoughts, from my brain, arranged on this page in such a way that you can see them and, quite literally, read my mind.

The whole thing is just . . . wonderful. It’s frakking amazing, when you think about it. All the steps it took, from ancient hominins around a fire, interpreting each others emotions and needs, creating a series of actions—verbal utterances, physical gestures, facial expressions, kinetic movements—that eventually came, through social agreement, to represent something.

Wonderful.

Full of wonderment.

k