Words

WORDS

A friend, acquaintance, person I know asked why I wanted to write books.  He said anyone can write a book after all they’re just a bunch of words that someone put down on paper. I expected him to use the “million monkeys with a million typewrites could write one of Shakespeare’s plays” argument, so I was ready with the MIT study defense.  That study proved that monkeys don’t have the manual dexterity to hold down the shift key and hit a letter key at the same time to get the capitalization correct in Romeo and Juliet. [Side Note 1: The study can be found at the MIT site at WWW.Mostly Idiotic Twaddle .con/monkeybusiness] Then I decided that as an educated man I should take the high road and simply said “OH yeah!”

His comment got me thinking about the use of words, and from there I went to the words themselves. I mean since you’re reading this you must be able to read, or have the ability to understand the meaning of the written word. So just where and when did we start to use words. I went to “Whykapedia” for the answer. [Side Note 2: Whykapedia is the internet site that doesn’t really give you the answer to your question but rather decides why you want to ask the question in the first place.] Whykapedia sent me to ROS.com [Side Note 3: ROS can be found at Really Old Stuff. Con] There I read about morphemes, roots, graphemes, symbols, and languages.  All of which gave me a clue to what words are, but not the where and when of the use of words. [Side Note 4: I really didn’t understand all of the answers that I got there but after an hour I gave up and decided that I probably could do without the exact meaning of the word “word” after all.]

What to do? For days I poured over history texts trying to find out the answer to when we first started to use words. Back to recent references of the “Rap” artists who make up their own words. Further back to the Renaissance where neat words like “Thou” and “Joust” came into use. The Romans used a lot of words. For instance they had all of the road signs they put up all over Europe.  Of course all of the signs read “This way to Rome,” but at least they tried. The Celts who preceded them had a bunch of words as well.  Like “London’” “Dover,” and a large number of references to basketball. 

Obviously I needed to go as far back as I could before I was going to solve the question. After an exhaustive search [Side Note 5: Translate as more than a half an hour.] it turned out to be a question of how you define words. Spoken or written. Pictorial or symbolic. Dirty or clean. I eventually decided to go with the written word since it was the writing of books that got me started on this quest in the first place.  I eliminated the pictorial references as I was getting too many pornographic listings, and I went with “clean” for the same reason. This got me to early “words” in the caves of France which were dated at 10,000 B.C.  Further research showed that the words “Kilroy was here,” were added after the pictures of the cave men chasing mastodons.  There were references to the Egyptians using words as far back as 3,500 B.C.  Strangely when translated into English they read “Kilroy was here.”

I eventually settled on an ancient text that had been translated from Sanskrit.  Here the story of the first written word was revealed. It was in what today is modern Turkey, at a fast food restaurant. There Al, the owner, had been using pictures to let his customers show what they wanted. The problem arose when too many people complained that they were getting the wrong order. Since the motto of the place was “Get it my way, or else” that didn’t bother him very much, but he was losing business so he had to come up with a solution.

In the past all a patron had to do was point to the picture of a cow or a sheep and the kitchen would know that they wanted either beef or lamb on their gyros. The problem developed when the Al’s mother started to sell sheep’s wool sweaters at the cash register. [Side Note 6: Yes, I know that cash wasn’t invented until later, but that’s what the article said so deal with it.] His mother put up a picture of a sheep to show the origin of the wool. 

People would point to the picture of the sheep, but they were getting wool yarn on their sandwich. Finally the owner came up with the idea of something other than a picture to let the clerk at the counter know what a patron wanted to eat. He invented words.  Patrons were to come up to the counter and use the words that he invented to state their preference. The only problem I’m left with is whether “Moo” or “Baa” was the first written word.