Michael Card - Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of Gods Lovingkindness

The discussion began in 1844. It took thirteen more years for the members of the Philological Society of London to decide that a new comprehensive dictionary of the English language was what the world needed. It would be impossible to imagine a more erudite group of scholars, with specialties ranging from anthropology to zoology, but all masters of linguistics. (J. R. R. Tolkien, an inventor of languages himself, was on one of the later committees.) These men (and regrettably, because of the time, they were all men) were experts in Sanskrit, ancient Hebrew, and Latin, readers of cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs; but above all they were passionately devoted to their own language, English.

The first committee estimated that the project would take no more than ten years to complete and would fill four volumes. In reality, the dictionary was initially completed in 1928, over eighty years after the first proposals were made. Instead of four volumes, it covered forty.

I refer to it being initially completed because the fact is it never was finished and never will be. The editors of what would come to be known as the Oxford English Dictionary realized that since language is always growing, changing, and adapting, no dictionary is ever finished. The fact that the greatest linguistic minds of the day could so monumentally underestimate such a task hints at the complexity I mentioned abovenot just of the English language, but of language itself.

We can theorize about words and how they work. We can task the greatest minds with listing and outlining and defining them. We can analyze the structures we use to put them into language, but in the end the way words work is an inexpressible mystery. Almost without our awareness they do their thing, lighting up the neural pathways in our brains. We use words to define other words because words are all we have. But ultimately they are only clumsy bricks. Words are, in one sense, beyond words; even the simple ones are often indefinable.

Indefinable wordswords that require paragraphs and parables to provide even a hint of all they might possibly mean. Love and hope are two of the most obvious examples. Of course the Oxford English Dictionary lists definitions for them, but they fail miserably because love and hope are bigger than words. Their meanings cannot be contained by syllables, cannot be fully expressed by the sounds we make with our voices. Groups of letters hint at the inexpressible; they are sounds we put to mysteries. They fascinate and amaze me.