The Paradox of Mastery

Think Tank #118

You know how they say that being too intelligent can make you lonely because you can’t relate to most people? It got me thinking.

John and I have been talking a lot about language learning. John is learning Italian, and I (pragmatist that I am) took an interest in Latin. I’ll never need it, I’ll be mostly clueless when we go to Italy next summer, but it allegedly expands your vocabulary, and one day, a year or two from now, I might be able to read Cicero. Good stuff, right?

Anyway. Trying to construct basic sentences in another language really got me thinking about how much I take for granted. There’s so much that goes into communication. Finding the words you need. Knowing how to structure them into an intelligible sentence. Understanding the words that the person you’re communicating with spits back at you.

Then there’s so many little nuances. Contractions. Idioms. Irregularities. It’s remarkable that our brains are wired to pick up on this stuff automatically.

But some people are more literate than others. If you immigrate to another country in your teens, for example, you might have a decent but imperfect understanding of your native language, and a decent but even less perfect understanding of your new language. It’s enough to get by. In some ways, it’s more useful than mastering one language, because you can communicate effectively with people who speak either language.

However, if you want to discuss tough concepts—‘heady,’ academic stuff, like science or philosophy or whatever—you need a larger vocabulary, and you need to be able to create and comprehend complex sentences.

Is it possible to get to a point where furthering your knowledge transcends even that usefulness, and just becomes ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’? Is there a point where you learn so many words that it’s difficult to even use them, because no one knows them all but you?

I wrote an essay about David Foster Wallace where I articulated this a lot better. I talked about whether his work would have been better if it was easier to understand.

It’s kind of ironic, actually. The basic motivation for learning a language is to communicate effectively. However, when you master a language, you get to a point where it’s possible to communicate without anyone understanding you at all.

So, I made the meme you saw at the beginning of this post because I thought it was fun. I don’t actually believe it’s true. After all, part of mastering language is knowing your audience. Just because you know most of the words in the dictionary, that doesn’t mean you should use them all the time.

Still, after a certain point, communication isn’t really the point of language learning anymore, is it?

It’s kind of like how communication isn’t really the point of learning a ‘dead’ language like Latin.

Then what is? Art? Scholarship? The joy of learning something new?

Does there need to be a ‘point’ at all?

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