Blood is a fluid that keeps us living. Its flow is synonymous with the flow of life. What does happen to our organic self if this mysterious red fluid stops nourishing our bodies? We will perish, to say the least.
What to say when our cultures get anaemic. What constitutes our cultural blood, then? What makes us cultured and why do we become culturally anaemic?
Languages are waters that nourish a culture. Like blood, language maintains the flow of knowledge within and beyond culture. When a language is reduced to mere words, the vitality of culture to communicate and enlighten declines.
Words do not stand still; they keep changing over time. Contexts change; new expressions emerge; realities shift, and language stores every evolutionary twitch in its large vocab heart. Language stores the pace of life, maybe not in the true sense of life’s complexities, but in a sense humans do life.
Nevertheless, life remains uncertain as it has ever been. It feels decent that a human does language in response to uncertainties. Imagine how it would be difficult to contextualize the emerging nuances in human thoughts if our languages are not there for us carrying the knowledge from antiquity. Could we afford to make sense of the modern world, in any field perhaps, if languages have not been doing sentences and paragraphs for us?
Our sense of time, our vision of history, and our appreciation of culture start with how people do language. The fluidity of language turns a language into our cultural blood.
Language is as precious for culture as blood is for life.