Words have traditionally been the backbone of intelligent communications. Some researchers suggest that humans began using spoken words, anywhere between 50000 and 70000 years ago. Words then were often just a collation of sounds, but they seemed to have served their purpose. How they managed their communications in their worlds so long ago can only be imagined!
Today, in the second millennium of the common era, as
per Ethnologue, which is a language catalogue and resource site, there are
around 7111 languages in the world (not including dialects, sign languages)
with an estimated 840 million words.
And with such a surfeit of languages and words, our
world should naturally (if not certainly!) be a very interesting one for those
of us who will only take some time from our busy routines, to peek into the
world of words.
The word that has
randomly popped up this time is SIMPLE.
This seemingly simple word, you would be
surprised to know, has kept kings, philosophers, scientists, poets, military
strategists, and product designers anxious and busy over the centuries!
Young school children learning grammar and getting
vexed with moving over from a simple sentence that has a subject
and a verb, to complex sentences having dependent and independent clauses and
subordinating conjunctions, are no better off than budding accountants who need
to cautiously navigate simple interest and its compounding
version, so that both the lender and the taxman are happy!
Civilizations, it is said, have risen and fallen,
because of the complex power structures that were developed to maintain them.
That - simplicity - could have sustained them is best articulated by E.
F Schumacher when he says “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more
complex, and more violent. It often takes a touch of genius and lots of courage
to move the needle in the opposite direction and simplify things.”
The art of simplicity is always a puzzle of
complexity.
Keeping it simple requires hard work, though! Mark Twain famously and
wittingly wrote - “I don’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long
one instead!”
Long before sustainable development became a global
buzzword, Mahatma Gandhi’s word play remains inspirational – “Live simply
so that others may simply live!”
Obviously, the anthropogenic world is confused and
believes that order is simplicity and goes to great lengths to build one based
on the most elaborate and complex of socio-economic and cultural rules. If only
they understood the concept of entropy, or at the very least listen to Khalil
Gibran when he says - “The obvious is that which is never seen until someone
expresses it simply!”
