on language

When I think about the different languages and the all that is lost in translation I visualize chaos. It calms me down to think about it in the bigger picture: even when speak the same language, and we grew up speaking that language, and we are very familiar with all idioms and nuances, we still can't be totally sure if we are speaking the same "language". What I mean by that is that every person has their own meaning for a variety of concepts that we believe are understood by all in the same way. In the clip, she uses "love" as an example. We could use "despair" and still it would be impossible to determine if we are or not talking about the same feeling. Mostly because we use language to communicate our understanding of the meanings we attribute to these words. And I say words because before we give them meaning, they are just these agglomerates of signs (letters) that together make an audiovisual symbol (the word as we read it and say it).
Language has always been an important part of my life, but until I watched Waking Life (this excerpt), I had never thought about it the way I do now, as a flawed system. In a way, it's sad because it exposes our inability to communicate successfully and predicts a world of no real connections, where all that is said, written, acted is simply an attempt to say, write, act the idea we have deep in our minds. However, just like we can't be sure we all disagree on what love or happiness or guilt are, we don't know if our rough tries aren't successful either. We'll never know.