Random Thoughts: On Words

Well, I have asthma and can't sleep, so here is the first in what I shall term my "Random Thoughts" sections which are going to be the more "bloggy" part of the blog where I go off on random philisophical tangents.

I told my friend I had created a blog and he said since its not really about me it isn't really a "blog" which (I admittedly didn't know) stands for "biographical log." Therefore, according to the strict definition, this is not a blog, but according to what a blog has *come to mean* I think it still applies.

This brings me to a thought about words and language and the pitfalls we run into when trying to interpret things through language. If my friend and I don't even use the fairly recent term of "blog" in the same way, how much harder must it be to figure out what writers hundreds or thousands of years ago, often writing in languages that no longer exist, meant? This causes huge problems in the interpretation of myth. When the Egyptians and Greeks said "Light in Extension" what did that mean? What light? Spiritual light? Physical light? The light of knowledge?

The Jewish bible is a good example of this confusion of words. The Torah scrolls are written without vowels, so one word could mean a whole bunch of different things. Kabbalists have made an entire esoteric system out of decoding and interpreting words through various means. Even in the new testament we run into translation problems. Should that verse be translated as "thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live" or "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"? Think of the difference just that one word might have made to Europe if King James had translated differently. The King James bible, we should also remember, was translated from the Latin, which was translated from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, several hundred years after the testaments were written. I mean seriously, who speaks Aramaic anymore?

All this to say that we should never take for granted that the written version of a myth is the "real" version. In the end, I think, myths can be inturpreted in many different ways and on some level it is up to the individual to choose how the myth makes sense to them. I hope that by putting my interpretations of the myths up here, I am helping people to think about them and come up with their own interpretations and meanings instead of coming off as someone who has it "right". I'm not doing this to stroke my own ego, but to find a forum where I can express and organize the ideas that jumble about in my head and to tell the stories I find interesting. Hopefully you guys will join me in exploring these myths, stories and ideas.

Good night!

(I hope that made some sort of sense. I maybe shouldn;t have written this at 3am high off Ventalin :s )