Now, I have never made a secret of the fact that mathematics isn’t one of my strong points; this doesn’t embarrass me, it doesn’t bother me and it’s certainly not something I regret. And this is not to say that I don’t “get” math – I don’t particularly want to “get” it! Given a good teacher, math made perfect sense to me, but that never made it apparent what the actual point was!
I realised at a pretty early age that my brain was leaning towards language and the written word.
Fair enough, some mathematical theorems turned out to have their uses. Take Pythagoras for example: he taught me that when driving somewhere, there’s no need to go ’round when you can go straight down the middle. Then again, I’ll bet Pythagoras never figured on one-way traffic systems, so in a sense, you can actually disprove that particular theorem vis a vis it’s practicality in the 21st century! And just to get that particular theorem to work, you had to multiply everything by itself and then add them up just to arrive at a conclusion which, although interesting enough, is actually pretty pointless when you can just drive down the middle – assuming you’re not in a one-way traffic system! And here’s something else: you definitely won’t be whipping out a calculator just to see if you’re actually going to save time or distance; and your satnav doesn’t particularly care either!
But recently, my thoughts have turned to what it was about math that never did it for me and what it was about language that did do it for me. And here it is:
Math is an absolute and language isn’t. For example, 2+2=4; that’s it! That has always been it and that will always be it! Sure you can add a few zeros here and there and you end up with an exponential of the same numbers, but make no mistake – they are still the same numbers.
But language is a different kettle of fish. Take for example the word Gay: fifty years ago, it meant happy. Today, generally, it means something else entirely, but it still also means happy. So thirty years ago when Larry Grayson was saying “What a gay day!”, he meant one thing but was implying another. Those same thirty years ago, 2+2=4; pretty boring, huh? Hell, two million years ago, 2+2=4!
Mathematicians like to bang on about how mathematics is the only pure language and they may have a point there, but think of this: it’s always been around and these fine folk needed actual language to express it. So we humans now have a “language” which the math chaps call pure, but it wouldn’t exist without the spoken and written word. And to dispel any arguments before they arise, why else would they have spent so much time raping the Greek alphabet and a goodly portion of the English one to express some of their more complex riddles?
And you can’t tell a story using math…Physicists will say, “Yes. We can express the creation of the universe mathematically”; but if you choose to believe in such stuff, the bible does it somewhat more eloquently. And Stephen King would have never had quite the impact he has had if, in ‘Salem’s Lot, he had chosen to describe Ben Mears pounding a stake through a vampire’s heart as an equation outlining the conservation of momentum!
It boils down to this: they say eskimos have about fifty words for snow, I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that I can say I’m telling a lie in quite a few different ways, or that I can say yes, or aye to confirm assent. 2+2 will always be 4.
And let me tell you this: 2-2=0, or put in English: two minus two equals nothing. If I had a choice of saying yes as a “1″ or an “aye”, the ayes will aways have it.
