Language

 

Look-it-up language, how do you spell that? Lookitup, Look It Up, like a birdcall. Look-it-up’s become a language of our minds, who travel online for hours of the week. When permacrisis is declared Word of the Year by a famous dictionary, we have never heard of permacrisis, we have to Look-it-up. It’s an open question if Look-it-up is symptomatic of permacrisis, or vice versa, but it pays to know. Apparently. Online we may bounce from one permacrisis to another, or reel, only to meet more fresh language that is simply safest, sincerest Look-it-up. It has its own poetry, by which is meant Look-it-up is new sensory experience, intellect update, blurry around the edges. However, it’s not as simple as phonemes, or your first language. TikTok missiles and shock jock whistles and schlock rock samples are itemised minutely, hourly. Screens – long, regular, short – reference communications requiring cinematic recall, translation radios, tune encyclopedias. Scarcely can Look-it-up be labelled artificial intelligence, as it’s our palpable minds must process this plethora of peopled expression. Still, discernment has its limits, to the screen flicking nearness newness in our eyes and ears at maximum rates. Look-it-up language tests mind’s auxiliary motors, texts its febrile manifestations, tempting a tipping point. New vocabulary pushes us to rest, to leave the screen awhile playing self-Scrabble with its millions of players. Our attention shifts towards origins that are not English and not non-English, not itunes or iframes or iabstracts. Our attention finds, for example, green. Trees are green, their manifold variations of foliage, variegated and non-variegated, viridian and verdant, offering us their exactly earthly beauty free of the novel sensations of Look-it-up. Grass in its endless possibilities sways and glows, a consistent healing of the ground that gives grass life, sending out seeds. Patterns of green river over us, beneath us, constellate and rush, shooting out more green than words in dictionaries, mysteriously indifferent to permacrisis, whatever that is; or so we hope. More green, and then our attention yearns towards original languages, the language of origin, that which makes our English sound like any other birdsong, the trees patterns upon patterns, and green simply the majesty of light and water. Such that our attention becomes speechless and clear before the languages our minds cannot keep up with. Sensory languages that all in glory extend simply and surely due to their very existence the invitation to Look-it-up. As though already, permacrisis left in the too hard basket long ago, it were all one omniscient Word of the Year, not requiring a definition. Beyond definition.