Lecture 4: Mapping & Systems

I found Jean-Pierre Gorin's video about twin idioglossia to be fascinating. Back home I live next door to twin girls my age, and over the years we've become close friends. When they were younger their mom would dress them in identical sweaters and matching headbands because it was cute. They did everything together and were inseparable, even when they went to school and made new friends. Now at the age of nineteen they go to separate colleges and frequently Skype to keep in contact. The other day they started to video chat only to realize that they were wearing the exact same plaid shirt and heart locket without any prior coordination.

"Reflection" Portrait I took of Emily & Lauren

Emily and Lauren have always had their own form of communication. If we play the guessing game Taboo we have to put them on separate teams, otherwise they'll use inside jokes or references that sound like gibberish to anyone else but that they understand perfectly well to mean "Reality TV" or "George Washington". When they're together their voices tend to sound eerily similar, to the point where even after years of knowing them I can't identify who is on the other end of the phone. Watching Grace and Ginny Kennedy interact was like an extreme version of how I sometimes feel when around Emily and Lauren. They've created their own language foreign to anyone else, which only intensifies their already strong bond as not only siblings but as practically genetically the same being.

Grace and Ginny were simply trying to create something familiar and relatable within a dysfunctional household. Their parents didn't have the best knowledge of grammar or language themselves, and combined with twin tendency to communicate with another child just like them, such an environment fostered their seemingly strange development. The video reminded me of this somewhat recent viral hit:

Even the English language can seem nonsensical, but we try to make rules like "i before e except after c" in order to make sense of a bizarre and random world. Maybe Grace and Ginny or Emily and Lauren are past the age typically associated with idioglossia, but it seems only natural to cling to something comfortable or understandable when so much around us is just noise.