Remote Control
We know it as we speak, we handle words instinctively like tools we’ve used a thousand times. Every time we use words to make someone angry or to comfort them we are producing chemical reactions in their body. Admittedly, our physical presence plays a part in intimidating or calming, but in a low sensory telephone call, or a zero sensory letter, the disembodied words can still bring horror or joy. Naturally most words aren’t used to flood the listener with stress hormones. A great book can grow a world around the reader. A great comedian can pull happiness and relief from a crowd of thousands who share the mood like blood circulating in a body. And of course there are those who can move crowds past restraint into activity and even violence.
Many words cause changes in our minds and bodies but the context generally defines our reaction. There are words that build up enough charge from the way they are generally used that they often elicit an emotional bump. Please don’t be offended at the following content, it’s only here for demonstration purposes, you filthy fucking whore! Sorry, but I wanted you to pull up short. Did you feel that? It’s easy to find these words, just ask yourself what you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying. Feel what happens in your stomach and in your nerves as you read: Cunt, Nigger, Slut, Kike, Slant Eyes. Was it stress, fear, shame? Probably it was. These words are obvious hooks that make it hard not to react. The connection between words and chemicals is right there, requiring no further test. 
Even though it sounds mystical this is why I believe that humans of our state of development could not have been functionally mute, ever. We couldn’t have been ourselves and slowly developed language. Language is innate because it must be. That is circular thinking on the face of it, but I don’t mean it as a place to sit contentedly. I mean that it’s tangled up with something about the evolution of species that we have developed no foundation for. The reason I can feel so certain is that humans, but without language makes as much sense as a fully functioning car, but without an engine.
Words are the catalytic enzymes of the human domain.
This is so obvious as to be invisible. Words (and language) are the answer to the question “How will these complicated primates get their complicated business done?.” Language points to the human foundation of society. Language is about humans as a group, and about the group as organism. Innate language ability is the “human genome” of thinking and relating.
And species wide, our many languages speak to the same issues. That is, no language is alone able to discuss some angle on reality that others are not. No one language holds a surprising- one of a kind function that others can’t touch. If it’s difficult to imagine what that kind of exception would even be, that may point to why it doesn’t exist. It’s not in our presets for communication. The fact of innate language with a common range points to some underlying structures: A library of recombinant symbols and memes the we use both to interpret and explain.
And that’s up next in this category.
“The Human Memeome”.
