The language problem in 'The island of temptations': when your feelings are more complex than your vocabulary

"I have no words."

We say it every day.

Sometimes it's just a stock phrase, a cliché that equals: "I'm amazed or surprised."

On other occasions, "I have no words" means precisely that: that one lacks the linguistic resources to express how one feels or what is happening to one.

Language is full of traps, gaps and ambiguities, which we circumvent and fill with the most available materials.

To recognize these obstacles, it is not necessary to go back to Lord Chandos, the character of Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, tormented because he had lost "the ability to think or speak coherently about anything", nor to dedicate himself to poetry, like Juan Ramón Jiménez, who begged: "

, give me the exact name of things."

For example, in

the contestants resort to that expression every night.

Around the bonfire, after watching one of those videos that condense the most reprehensible behavior of their partners, the allegedly aggrieved despair, curse and, questioned by the presenter, confess: "I have no words."

Sadness, anger or disappointment overwhelm what the contestant is capable of saying.

Reality is so intense that it cannot be described and therefore cannot be shared with others.

The abyss between words, so insufficient, and things, so painful, condemns the contestants to suffer alone.

It is not something unique to this format.

In

the collaborators spend a large part of the program trying to find the right words to describe their vicissitudes and it cannot be a coincidence that Jorge Javier Vázquez, who knows how to tame and guide his polemicists so well, is a trained philologist.

The first great

in the history of Spain,

, left phrases like "who puts his leg on me so that he does not raise his head", with which a contestant expressed his desolation at a reversal of fate, or "what is between you and me is called symbiosis", to express chemistry and understanding between two of them.

A significant anecdote: when a philosopher with a much richer vocabulary than the rest of the contestants, the Basque Koldo, arrived on that same program, the rest made fun of him using words like parallelepiped, without really knowing what it meant.

Jorge Javier (right) with several collaborators of 'Sálvame'.Telecinco

This gap between language and reality, as old as language itself and which has been discussed since Plato's

, is present in every communication process.

Sometimes it affects us in a more dramatic way: the contestants, unable to verbalize, end up kicking.

Sometimes milder: we go blank or have to take a detour to finish a sentence in the middle of a conversation.

But it never completely goes away.

In fact, every attempt to ignore it, that is, to

without the hesitations and flaws that slur words, has been, basically, a maneuver to impose a single way of seeing and reading the world.

But what do words have to do with things?

For centuries it was believed that a secret relationship existed between the object being named and the word used to name it.

It is an ancestral and suggestive hypothesis, the naturalist one, which Borges summarized in his poem

: “If the name is an archetype of the thing, the rose is in the letters of the

and the entire Nile is in the word

”.

However, today philologists reject this theory, which continues to be used as a literary game, and agree that the relationship between sign and object is arbitrary.

If the four letters in

refer to a flower, it is due to a social fact: this is how the speakers of our language have been agreeing.

Some of the contestants on the Telecinco program 'La isla de las tentaciones'.

“Language does not contain meaning, it guides it”, explains Marta Silvera, PhD in Cognitive Sciences, philologist and specialist in neuroscience.

“It's a two-way street, but we tend to place too much weight on words.

Cognition is prelinguistic, even though we approach it with more language.

The language does not represent the concept because it is not a static element;

and it is not because a human being, like his narratives, is an open system.

When we say that we have no words, we are alluding to a luminous truth: that we are not just language.

Another hypothesis, that of Sapir-Whorf, although it is today discredited by several academics, says that "language is the mold of thought."

In other words, from how we speak, we think.

It is the so-called linguistic determinism that certain conspiracy theorists turn upside down when they argue that, through changes in the language used in the media, the powerful would be trying to restrict free thought.

Silvera does not share it: “The concept precedes the language.

There is thought without language and not all cultural aspects are linguistic”.

Nor Vicente Luis Mora, doctor in Spanish Literature, critic and writer.

"I disbelieve in any kind of determinism."

But if language is not capable of disrupting mechanisms as deep as those of cognition or reasoning, it does operate in the field of feelings or ideology, so the author of Central Europe warns: "As of a certain

, one should also be aware of the ideology that oozes his metaphors and lexical choices.

In my work there are entire semantic fields that never appear, by choice, so as not to keep alive the resonance of the sociohistorical realities that generated them.

As the poet Berta García Faet says: all sentimental education is basically linguistic”.

"Things are clear"

In

, a dialogue by Oscar Wilde published in 1898, the main character complains of a "deplorable custom among the young": the "monstrous cult of facts" and the "morbid and insane faculty of telling the truth." ”.

With his usual irony, Wilde denounced that the excess of realism was killing the imagination in art.

The writer Oscar Wilde, elegant in dressing and always choosing the right words.

Mora detects something similar in contemporary literature.

He has devoted an entire essay to the phenomenon,

“There are cyclical trends in literature that oscillate between two poles: one realistic, introspective and documentary, and the other imaginative, social and fictional.

Unfortunately, we swim in the dark night of mirror manners”.

“The plague of authenticity”, he continues, “goes from the ragpickers of the suburbs to some writers in low hours;

Those who do not master fiction prefer to sell themselves as a product or sell their family or emotional environment, which is even worse.

The sensationalist spectacle sells, and that has reached the books, even poetry, which had been released until recently.

If this "plague of authenticity" is filling contemporary literature with self-absorbed narcissism, its effects on politics, always closely related to language and the claim to say

, would be even more worrying.

“There is an effort, let's say, popular, for expository clarity, to call bread, bread and wine, wine;

in the face of so much technical jargon”, explains Nere Basabe, writer, PhD in History of Ideas and professor of Contemporary History at the UAM.

"There is a certain prejudice or caution against political language, which the French call

, wooden tongue, assimilated to hollow rhetoric, especially in mass parties.

Faced with this, new parties, let's say, populists, set themselves up as spokespersons for the people speaking their own plain language.

But let's not kid ourselves: the wine may be wine, but the bottle will be said to be half empty or half full depending on the perspective”.

Emmanuel Macron speaking at a rally in Dijon.

Politics is one of the fields where the distance between reality and language becomes more controversial.

Carlos Spottorno

“Maybe there isn't much controversy around what a table is”, continues Basabe, “but when talking about the nation, freedom or Spain, everyone understands what they want.

There are as many meanings as uses of the word.

Because language is a historical production, which evolves over time and, despite the fact that at all times there is a minimum of consensus around the meanings, the margins for controversy are also very wide”.

Is manipulating language manipulating society?

“Political speeches have more to do with the appellative function of language, which seeks to achieve an effect on the receiver, than with the referential function, which informs by giving a simple account of a fact”, explains Basabe.

“Political language always seeks to convince, persuade and mobilize the audience.

And it does so through a subjective, emotional and irrational, partisan use of language, creating its own worldview to which it wants to attract the more public the better”.

Are we talking about manipulations like the ones Viktor Klemperer describes in

, about language and Nazism?

Not only and not exactly, because, as Basabe insists, "not only Nazism invented a

perverting, as they say out there, the meaning of the words”.

The key, according to the teacher, is that “there is no neutral, true use, and another manipulated, but different uses in combat that pursue different purposes and attract one audience or another.

Many studies have also been carried out on the language of ETA, for example, that it sought to legitimize itself through a military vocabulary ('we are in a war') and that to a large extent, through the media, we all end up buying, with terms such as command or truce.

On the other side, the terrorists assassinate, but the terrorists are shot down by the police”.

Perhaps, as the contestants on

know and as we will know the next time we stumble and emit a grunt and not a word, the tongue cannot handle everything.

It is not that sacred code that, as the Kabbalists believed, would allow summoning and mastering all the wisdom and forces of the universe.

But it is something alive that changes, as speaking communities change.

And, as Silvera concludes: “After each attempt to impose a change or homogenization, after each concealer, whether it is one pre-recorded in a computer program or from an obsessive fixer, cleaning and splendor, there is an intention: the call to order that it suits.

There is fear”.

Sometimes it is better to be speechless.

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