An English Major's Interjection

Since I have 20 minutes to write before catching the bus, and since I just got out of one of the best English courses I have ever taken in my life, I thought I'd write a little something about language.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."- Prospero, from Shakespeare's The Tempest

My Shakespeare professor just concluded a 16-week long course with the premise that our skin is the deepest one can go when trying to get "under someone's skin." The way to really do that, aside from cutting, gutting, or some other form of grotesquery, is to use language. Words are everything to us. I know this seems obvious, but if you really stop to think about it, language has an incredible impact on everything. People love, hate, die, cry, laugh, kill, educate, have epiphanies-- all through language. It's scary in its capacity to make us think, and in its own ability to move back on itself, play with itself, roll out from itself, and do things with itself that we absolutely could never dream of doing with our physical bodies.

The reason why so many serial killers don't speak is because they realize this. They're scared of the very language that may even have provoked them to do what they did.

How do we utilize this power? We advertise, we communicate, we try to sell, we write books and stories and papers, we talk, but do we realize? Do we fully understand the scope of the language we take for granted every single day we use it? The only way to "get under someone's skin," to affect them, to make them understand you, is through language. And isn't understanding what it's all about?

But how can you understand when all of these words, or almost all of them, may not necessarily mean what we take them to mean?
It's like conceiving a child (and this is relevant in Shakespeare). In the 1500s and early 1600s, you and your spouse could have a baby, but how do you know that it's yours? There's no way! S/He is fully in his/her head, and you are fully in your own. And whether or not the woman says "it's yours," according to Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale, "woman will say anything."
I don't mean to bring on the feminist criticism, but I just want to impress the point that we have no idea what words really mean.

And it's so wonderfully fascinating. Who knew that we could do so much with these letters, these symbols that don't really stand for anything, but that we've imbued with this absolute power that can make or break us in every single sense of those two words?

I could write at least four or five pages on that single sentence I quoted in the beginning. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is grounded in a sleep." And I bet you could too.

And I bet our interpretations would be completely different, and who knows if I would understand you or not?