Have you ever had an earworm stuck in your head for days on end, but instead of a song or a catchy tune it’s a seemingly random word or phrase? Weirdly, this often happens to me. These past few days, it’s been “language games.”
“What the fuck is a ‘language game?’” you’re probably asking.
I have no fucking idea.
“Then where did that come from?”
I don’t know.
“Who are you talking to?”
I’m tal-… Wait what?
So, I did what any reasonable pseudo-intellectual millennial would have done: poured myself a glass of rum and went straight to Wikipedia.
Lo and behold, it turns out there is such a thing.
“A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance “Water!” could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.”
Interesting, I thought.
It seems that Wittgenstein viewed communication through language as mediated by “rules” tacitly agreed upon by the individuals involved. If I said “oragon ka!” to someone from the Bicol Region, I’d probably be greeted with an approving gesture. But if I said that to someone from the Visayas, I’d likely be met with raised eyebrows and unsettled stares. “Oragon” means something positive in Bicol, like great or awesome, whereas in most Visayan languages, it means horny. But it seems logical to infer that different groups established their own rules on the use the same word. I don’t know anything about linguistics, so I’m not going to go into how these languages developed.
But it goes without saying that I learned Binisaya (Waray to most you), Bisaya, and Tagalog from people who speak those languages, and they learned from others as well. I learned English mostly from school and the innumerable cultural products introduced to us. Rules — grammar, syntax, and semantics — were all taught to me both formally and informally. I’ve come to learn that each language, and the culture embedded within it, has its own rules. If you break it, communication breaks down. If there are rules, then someone must have thought of making those and found a way to impose it to others, right?
Yeah… No. I’m not going into that rabbit hole.
So I decided I should call it a night. I figured I should just leave these stuff with more competent folks. But then when I saw this video.
Beach nourishment? I’ve heard of that before… Holy shit.
I searched for “beach nourishment manila bay” and these were the top five search results:
· https://mb.com.ph/2020/09/15/beach-nourishment-not-permanent-remedy-to-save-manila-bay/
· https://manilastandard.net/news/top-stories/334634/cimatu-stop-politicizing-manila-bay.html
In each of these articles, the term “beach nourishment” was used to refer to the current dumping of sand in a portion Manila Bay to create a sandy beach along Roxas Boulevard in Manila City. In short, they are dumping sand into the sea. So, I looked up “beach nourishment,” and this is what our old reliable Wikipedia has to say:
“Beach nourishment (also referred to as beach renourishment, beach replenishment, or sand replenishment) describes a process by which sediment, usually sand, lost through longshore drift or erosion is replaced from other sources. A wider beach can reduce storm damage to coastal structures by dissipating energy across the surf zone, protecting upland structures and infrastructure from storm surges, tsunamis and unusually high tides. Beach nourishment is typically part of a larger Integrated coastal zone management aimed at coastal defense. Nourishment is typically a repetitive process since it does not remove the physical forces that cause erosion but simply mitigates their effects.
“The first nourishment project in the United States was at Coney Island, New York in 1922 and 1923. It is now a common shore protection measure used by public and private entities.”
In essence, it seems that the generally accepted meaning of “beach nourishment” is that of replenishing beach sand lost due to erosion. But I’ve been to that part of Manila Bay, and there wasn’t much of a beach there. I then time-travelled back in history using Google Earth to see what it looked like before. I found a satellite image taken in 1984, still no sandy beach to replenish in this part of Manila Bay.
There has to be a beach there for you to “nourish” it, right? So, if there wasn’t any beach there before, just the sea, then wouldn’t that in fact be “dump-and-fill” or “land reclamation?” This shouldn’t be surprising, since Roxas Boulevard is built on reclaimed land.
I’m now more confused than when I started this exercise. Let me just step back a bit.
What do any of these have to do with Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games? The way I see it right now, since he argues because “games” are defined by “rules,” it should go without saying that imposing these rules are in itself an exercise of power. I’m not going to get into the hows and whys of that. But the fact that a highly technical term such as “beach nourishment” is being casually misused with impunity by government officials, with absolute disregard to how experts may react, speaks volumes at how these this government’s hatchet men have learned how to wield its power. It is disconcerting then that journalists appear to now be playing along with this game, probably unbeknownst to them even. So far, I haven’t heard of any other group to challenge how this term is being used. This government, it seems, is using its power to rewrite the rules of the language-game, and is insidiously gaining our approval.
I think these philosophical concepts are too much for my simpleton brain to handle. But this much is clear to me: if our public officials can and are willing to “rewrite” rules with impunity such as those of language-games, how much farther will they be willing to go? What other rules will they break and rewrite? Will we, as a people, stand for it?