Semantics — as in the meaning of our words — is something that has been top of mind for me lately as a first-time-director.
(Yes, I’m just as surprised writing those words as you are reading them.)
I’m currently halfway through my six-month filmmaking course. As a part of the course, we write and direct a one-act-play. While the focus of the course is screenwriting and directing for film, practicing with the limited tools available in theater is meant to teach us how to do more with less.
We go through the full process of theater direction. This includes things like developing characters and their backstories, casting, holding rehearsals, etc. I’ve had a taste of each of these elements as an actor, but it’s surprisingly different approaching these things as a director.
The director’s job is to set the vision, align the whole team on that vision, and then elicit specific emotions from the actors to execute on that vision. Not to mention, directors also leverage lights, stage design, and sound to amplify it all. Easy enough, right?
Wrong.
Since I’ve been acting for several months now and I’ve written the script for this play, I figured it would be a simple task to communicate my vision. But I underestimated the role that semantics would play.
And you call yourself a writer?…Alright, alright…gimme a break.
If I want to elicit grief as an emotion from my actors, I might say something like “move from a place of mourning”. One person might think of grief, but others might think anger, or regret, or even confusion (if he/she has never experienced a sense of mourning).
The same word has different connotations to each of us. It pushes us down rabbit hole discussions dissecting each emotion.
What does it mean to you? Why? How is that different from what he thinks or she thinks? What color does mourning look like to you? What have you mourned? How do you define it? How is it similar to a sense of loss? How is it different?
I’m always game for these kinds of discussions. That is until someone says the three most lethal words to open communication…
“That’s Just Semantics”
I’ve always had an issue with this common phrase. I hate it. It feels like someone abruptly placing a period to end a sentence that wasn’t meant to end. Yet.
Like you’re in the middle of a discussion, challenging a person to the point where you’re approaching the core of their beliefs, and in the process, revealing the core of your own — a vulnerable act — and just when you have a chance at seeing (and I mean REALLY seeing) the other person, you’re met with the intellectual disguise for fear of deep vulnerability and connection.
The part that gets me is the “just”. Just implies a lack of importance. It implies something inconsequential. Small, unnecessary.
But semantics — language — is anything but inconsequential.
Bell hooks describes this well in All About Love:
“Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word ‘love’ is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying…Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a sheer definition...Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”
Language defines us. It is how we think. And how we think shapes who we are. As a person and as a people.
The “Formal You”
An example of this that I’ve seen in my own life is the idea of a “formal you”.
If you took some kind of foreign language in school, this will sound familiar. If not, for context, some languages have two words for “you”, an informal and a formal.
The “informal you” is used to address an equal — a friend, close sibling, colleague, or classmate.
The “formal you” is used to address someone who you would regard with more respect — a parent, elder, teacher or boss.
I speak four languages: Gujarati, English, Spanish, and Hindi. Of these four, all but English have the idea of a “formal you” and it undeniably shapes culture.
In Gujarati, which is my first language and my parent’s native tongue, our two words for “you” are “tu” (informal) and “tamhe” (formal). This same delineation between the informal and formal “you” exists in Spanish as “tú” and “usted”, respectively. It also exists in Hindi as “tu” and “aap”.
If language shapes how we think — and thus, behave — what do you think this does for Gujarati, Spanish, or Hindi-speaking cultures?
The idea of a “formal you” instills an inherent level of respect in our communities. It establishes social norms and a natural hierarchy. If I would have called an elder “tu” when I was growing up, I would have been immediately corrected, reprimanded, or shamed for breaking our cultural code.
Language shaped how we thought of ourselves in relation to our society from a very young age and in a very specific way.
This dynamic doesn’t exist in the English language.
Sure, the idea of respecting your elders is a thing. But I remember always feeling like my American friends who didn’t grow up with any other language felt a lot more comfortable than I did speaking against their parents or teachers. They seemed to have much more agency and an individualistic mindset as compared to my friends who did grow up with other languages.
My point isn’t to say that anyone who only speaks English is inherently disrespectful. Let’s not be reductive.
But when we realize that a simple word like “you” can contain enough semantic complexity to impact cultures, the idea of “it’s just semantics” becomes a complete fallacy.
The Language of Numbers
Malcolm Gladwell offers an adjacent example of how language shapes us in his book Outliers.
You know that stereotype that Asian people are good at math? Well, it might be more than just a stereotype. It has to do with the number naming system.
First, it’s about the irregularity in the English language when it comes to the naming numbers. For example, eleven and twelve are very different in number form compared to fifteen or sixteen. And eighteen or nineteen is different in form compared to twenty-two or twenty-three. But this isn’t the case in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
“They have a logical counting system…Eleven is ten-one. Twenty is two-ten. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on…the difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children.”
In addition, the word for each number itself is often quicker to say in Asian languages than in English. Gladwell cites Stanislas Dehaene’s The Number Sense to make this point:
“Most [numbers] can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for example, 4 is “sì” and 7 “qī” [in Chinese]). Their English equivalents — “four”, “seven” — are longer; pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second.”
Gladwell explains that the human brain stores digits in a memory loop that runs for roughly two seconds. Meaning, it’s easiest to memorize whatever we can say or read within those two seconds.
We might think that the difference between one-quarter of a second versus one-third of a second is meaningless and imperceptible. But not in the case of language.
I read Outliers nearly a decade ago, and this section of the book is something I’ve thought about time and time again since then. There is power in our language, even when it’s invisible.
Differance: The Eternal Gap
On most days, we don’t pay attention to the weight of our words.
And on those days, it’s usually fine that we don’t. But left unexamined, this creates an eternal state of miscommunication, and resultantly, gaps in our understandings of one another.
Because language is so cultural and contextual, if we never get into the semantics, we never really know what another person is saying. What they mean is not necessarily what we think they mean. It’s like two people looking at the different faces of the same prism, each seeing light reflected in completely unique ways.
Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida created a word that reflects this chasm: differance.
The word “differance” (an intentionally misspelled version of the French word “difference”) refers to both the difference and deferral in our understanding of words. Ellie Anderson has a great YouTube video explaining this concept.
“For Derrida, given meanings are always context-relative. And they’re also always in a state of being positioned only in relation to other meanings.”
We speak, encoding words to mean something based on our understanding of them — an understanding that we learn from our cultures and societies. The person receiving this message decodes those same words, but their interpretation varies based on the cultural, societal, gender, or age-based context they might have learned.
Just like a game of telephone, we consistently end up with a warped sense of what another person might exactly mean.
Film as Medium
As a writer and actor, I spend a lot of my time pouring over the beauty of words.
But as a director, I’m experiencing the power of language in a way I never have before. Semantics holds the power of meaning, and thus connection. If we were to understand the roots of another person’s words, we might have a shot at understanding their intentions and perspectives.
And maybe, just maybe, we could bridge the gap that often exists between how we say things and how they’re interpreted.
I’m learning and have been completely blown away by how film as a medium does its job of narrowing that divide. How wonderfully dangerous might that be to modern society? If we all took the time to recognize our inevitable interconnectedness, what might our communities look like?
Semantically,
Shiv
If this post resonated and you’d like to chat, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and now YouTube.
this reminded me of something I heard in a pod one time (can't remember the episode but it was with Tom Morgan): https://twitter.com/tomowenmorgan
There are 96 words for love in Sanskrit: https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=1047