between the eyes and the mind, a horse is a horse

"We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style"
~ Tom Stoppard ~

"The problem with English is that it follows other languages down dark alleys and mugs them for their loose grammar."
~ Cudas (paraphrasing Jason Nicoll) ~

I love the English language. Unlike so many European languages, English has... so many words. To take French as an example, the title of Les Miserable by Victor Hugo is essentially untranslatable into English because the term itself has so many connotations that one phrase in English cannot mean the same thing. In English, there are so many synonyms, so many words that mean almost the same thing but not quite, while each word still has a depth and range of connotation.

I had a poetry lecturer at uni when I was doing creative arts - Merlinda Bobis - who insisted that English was not a language in which one should - or perhaps could - write poetry because it was the language of a colonising society. This is something I always found entertaining given the fact that English, as it stands, was formed as a result of years of various different cultures colonising Britain so it is in fact a fine example of the use of language in colonisation: change the language, change the way people think. (There is a story that one of my lecturers told when I was doing honours about a Carribean man committing suicide by leaping into a river weighed down with a two volume French dictionary. It kinda speaks to the power of language in the process of colonisation.)

To me, English is as poetic as any other language. Perhaps differently so but still truly capable of poetry. It has its own melody, its own beauty. It's a language which is as freeing and as limiting in the way it allows one to think and express one's thoughts. There is so much and so little of it.