Imagine a square circle.
No doubt, if you are not having a hard time of it, it is because you dismissed the exercise as impossible without trying it. And you would be right to do so; what I have asked you to do is impossible. A shape cannot be both square and circular. What on earth, then, have I described? The short answer is: a logical impossibility. Those two simple, elementary words put together refer to a shape that cannot exist under any conceivable circumstances. So in a sense the phrase denotes nothing. There are no square circles, even in the imagination, and so the words are, when joined, meaningless.
But so are the nonsense-words “frumious Bandersnatch” — yet no English-speaker would ever equate the two in terms of meaningfulness, even though both ultimately mean nothing. Yes, the one is composed of two actual English words, meaningful in themselves, but the impossibility of combining the concepts they represent renders the juxtaposition as empty of significance as if neither word denoted anything real or even possible.
Still, an incompatible pair of actual words has a suggestion of meaning that a pair of nonsense words does not. We cannot imagine what a square circle would look like, but we know what its properties would be — it would have four sides and a circumference Pi times its diameter — in a way that cannot be said for frumious Bandersnatches.
With a simple verbal trick, I have devised a figure that no mathematician could ever develop. The phrase looks mundane enough — “square circle” — but the construction is remarkable if you think about it. Three syllables have created something that physical reality could not.
Of course, the creation is incomplete, but the articulation of logical impossibilities in words is still more than can be managed without language. Words, as an abstract way of signifying ideas, do not, like ideas themselves, have to be compatible to be put together. The sounds and symbols that language attaches to definite concepts and realities have no inherent significance, and so may be manipulated without reference to realities. Thus we can, as I have just done, talk, though not think, of something which has both four sides and a circumference. Thanks to the peculiar human faculty of language, even that which cannot be imagined can be described.
This phenomenon appears often in literature. “Oxymoron” (the conjunction of contradictory terms) is a standard poetic device, sometimes bordering on cliche. Shakespeare lampoons its commonness in love-poetry when he has Romeo rant about “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!” as he pines away for his first love Rosaline. Certainly oxymoron is common enough that we do not stop to think how odd it is that we can put incompatible ideas together like that. We cannot imagine what sick health would feel like, but we are willing to accept the phrase as somehow meaningful. To be sure, in instances like this, the oxymoron may just denote a confused frame of mind — but even so, this is not the same as saying, “I don’t know whether I’m sick or healthy.” Romeo wants actually to combine the ideas because, in his chaotic mental state, he feels as if he is experiencing both simultaneously, and the concrete concepts of sickness and health to be combined unless put forth in words.
A more extreme expression of this strange power language affords is seen in certain types of imaginative literature, to describe scenarios that are supposed to transcend physical possibility. For instance, H.P. Lovecraft writes in “The Call of Cthulhu” of a giant stone structure whose “geometry … was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.”
What does this mean? If asked to visualize it, you would have to admit that the various elements of the description are incompatible. Something cannot be fixed and in flux at the same time. But that is the point. Lovecraft uses words linked in themselves to realities to construct something outside reality. What Lovecraft describes is in fact nothing (no [real] thing), but still this nothing is given some sort of existence in language. With language, and only with language, we can twist reality to produce concepts that on their own could not be real.
It may be a trivial matter to say the words “square circle,” but it is a trivial matter that reality cannot accommodate without the power of language.
Matthew Diem is a third-year College student majoring in English and classics.
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