Linguistic Patterns

There are two major patterns to be found in the structure of language, one involving confirmation of preexisting associations within mental categories and the other involving contradiction across the same categories.

'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die- to sleep.
To sleep- perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

— Shakespeare, Hamlett (2022)

Linguistic patterns demonstrate differential excitement between list 1 and list 2 qualities. For example, we call undesirably ordinary or unexciting things “cold,” “icy” (cold/solid), “dry” (solid), “stale” (solid), “stiff” (solid), “tired” (stasis), “slow,” “lifeless” (static), “tame” (orderly), “square” (order), “flat” (order), “lackluster” (dark), “drab,” “ho-hum” (low pitch), “meh” (low pitch), “monotonous” (orderly sound), “underwhelming” (down), “boring” (inward), “dull” (not spiky/round), “small” and “ordinary” (order/familiar), despite the lack of a consistent, outwardly observable reason to do so, and as if they fail to satisfy a desire for some amount of heat, fluidity, dynamism, disorder, brightness, high pitch, variation, spikiness, large size and outwardness, which represent higher excitement in “things are heating up,” “a fever pitch” (heat), “on cloud nine” (fluid/multiple), “boiling over” (hot/fluid/up), “blood was boiling” (red/fluid/hot), “make a splash,” “get a rush” (speed), “earth shaking” (dynamic), “earth shattering” (disorder), “cracked up” (disorder/up), “all hell broke loose” (many/hot/disorder/free), “bright and breezy” (bright/fluid), “tickled pink” (bright), “rosy” (red), “red hot” (bright/red), “buzzing” (high pitch), “alarmed” (loud/high pitch), “riled up,” “shook up” (dynamic/up), “sensory overload” (over/up), “freaking out,” “blown away” (away/outward), “on pins and needles” (spiky), “a big deal” (large size), “swell” (size increase) and “no small matter.”

Hundreds of examples of expressions like those above are listed in the following section: Differential Excitement in Language, along with those supporting the other suggested connections between primitive perceptual qualities and more derived concepts, which can be stated metaphorically, as in: anger and passion are hot, uncertainty and humor are fluid-like, insanity is outward and disorderly, certainty is solid and orderly, happiness is upward and bright, sadness is downward and dark, dominance is higher, submission is lower, difficulty is hard, lies are smoke and so on.

The given patterns evolve and persist in languages because their contents and meanings are psychologically congruent. Our interpretation of them is aligned with preexisting expectations. They have aesthetic value because they conform with categories that exist in the mind from birth, such as those defined by lists 1 and 2. Calling something in list 1 by the name of something else in the same list automatically makes sense and gives us a type of satisfaction, and the same goes for the qualities in list 2. “Boiling blood” makes sense because the qualities heat, disorder, redness and fluidity are all associated, congruently, in a mental category of higher excitement that also contains the idea of anger. “Take it with a grain of salt” makes sense because inwardness (taking), smallness, singularity and solidness are all congruently associated in a category with lack of excitement.

The pattern in which list 1 qualties denote higher excitement and list 2 qualties denote lower excitement is in contrast to incongruent expressions that juxtapose opposites, which have aesthetic value because they contradict expectations. These are part of a second, equally important linguistic pattern, which is addressed in the section Aesthetic Mixtures. They include expressions like “take it with a huge grain of salt,” which adds large size to the original, in contradiction to the concept that something as small as a salt grain is insignificant. The variation “take it with a bunch of grains of salt” adds multiplicity to make a mixture, although the phrase is still predominantly unexciting. It’s common for phrases to evolve this way, to include additional qualities from the opposite mental category, which compensate for the original, unmixed content. The attractiveness of contradiction is why we say things like “awfully good,” “old news,” “seriously funny,” “same difference” and “bittersweet.” In each saying one component is more exciting, respectively awfulness, newness, funniness, differentness and sweetness.

As an example of the distinction between a congruent and contradictory expression, “bored to death,” a literal, congruence-based metaphor, amuses us by reflecting the particularly universal idea that death is less exciting than life, while “thrilled to death,” an ironic, contradiction-based idiom, amuses us as well, in this case by the way it creates a contrast between differentially exciting things. The expression “dead asleep” is based on congruence because sleep, in terms of arousal, is closer to death than being awake. Shakespeare uses our collective understanding of this to be entertaining in the opening quote, while his suggestion that death is “Devoutly to be wish'd,” and brings unknown dreams, makes the lines overall a complicated mixture.

Aesthetic congruences and contradictions describe a significant portion of the structure of human language. Idioms can be sorted into one or the other type, and similar numbers seem to fall into each category, but the incidence of the contradictory type (mixtures) is higher in poetry, lyrics, the names of paintings, songs, fictional stories and other material specifically created to be aesthetically pleasing.

Because congruent expressions contain two or more references to phenomena in the same mental category, they can be thought of as combining qualities or concepts that reinforce each other, either on the more or less exciting side, while contradictory expressions can be thought of as mixtures, with the components counteracting each other to some extent and resulting in relative moderation with respect to arousal.

“Dead calm,” “dead silence” and “dead of night” are congruent idioms (combinations), based in part on unconscious associations between list 1 qualities and death. People are well aware that calmness, quiet and darkness are different from being dead. No one is actually mistaking one for the other, but they make more sense to us than mixtures of death like “dead restless,” “dead loud” and “dead of day.” The latter expressions, although they don’t exist, happen to be very close in their structure to some that do: “the quick and the dead,” “loud enough to wake the dead,” “die laughing,” and “Day of the Dead.”

Some idioms are made up primarily of references to things from the same excitement category, but they refer to something in the opposite category, making them contradictory overall despite the congruence of their content. “Ride off into the sunset” is exciting in its references to motion, outwardness and the sun, but it’s made less so by its meaning, to die. The contradiction between its content and meaning is at least part of the reason it’s popular. The phrase itself is actually a composition of dynamism (ride), outwardness (off), inwardness (into), heat (sun), brightness (sun) and downwardness (set), giving it a four to two balance of excitement before accounting for however unexciting it is due to meaning death. Death euphamisms are generally structured this way, using qualities from the more exciting side of primitive perceptual dimensions to make it sound a little more satisfying. Curiously, along with dynamism, outwardness is one of the most common qualities in list 2 that happens to be used this way. We speak of the deceased, which is Latin for “going away,” as if they’ve travelled outward, “departed,” “gone to the great beyond,” “passed away,” “crossed over,” or, in Shakespeare’s famous quote, “shuffled off.”

Thus, one can identify two major patterns in language that appear to originate through distinct mechanisms, although both of them are related to arousal. One is made up of combinations that amuse us because they vindicate universal associations. Another, evidently more amusing pattern, is made up of expressions that do just the opposite, violating the same associations. The former pattern is demonstrated in the following section, and the later in Monoaesthetic Mixtures.