Lexicon

(This is an answer to a friend's question that turned into a blog post.)

I remember when I first started training, I spent a lot of time on the internet reading material about martial arts, and discussing it with other people. The reading part hasn't changed that much (that's another essay), but I find myself engaging in a lot less discussion.

It isn't because I don't have anything to say. To the contrary, I've been training for eight and a half years, and I certainly have a lot more food for thought than I did at the beginning.

That said, I don't engage in much "net discussion" because of the lexicon problem. Here is what I mean. In any given system, there is a particular lexicon. One of of the difficulties of martial arts, in comparison to things like music, is that there isn't an extremely precise technical language that can produce nearly identical results. At best, we have a hodge-podge of terms from physics, poetry, and history meant to convey certain principles. Among practitioners in a common system, we at least use some of this same hodge-podge to convey meaning.

Further, this meaning is reinforced by common experience. Most of us have been the business end of the same people, and spent time trying to do the same things. Therefore, our "common picture", if you will, is a little bit more clear.

That said, I often find myself striving to communicate things in the dojo and failing. And this is among the people that I work with every day. I use a word like "push" to mean a certain method of moving feet and dropping weight on a certain vector, while relaxed and extending. When I say it to someone, they might interpret it to mean that they are going to plant their feet in one place and strongly "exploding" into their target with upper body force.

There is a constant struggle to find the right words to cause a certain set of muscular actions.

Now, remove that web of common experience. Things get a lot more tricky at that point, when you've got different people doing things. Made more confusing by the fact that some people use the same words to describe different sets of physical activities. (Get people from 3 styles of aikido together and try to define what "attack" means.) When you get a group of different people from different traditions on the same mat, confusion is inevitable.

But at least you've got the equalizer of being able to get hands on each other. Even if I can't say the right words to someone, I might be able to create understanding by demonstrating what I am doing. Whatever labels we put on things, we can all perceive the same phenomena in the same room.

Thus my problem with internet discussion. Now, we've muddied the waters even further by removing physical proximity. In this virtual dojo, nothing that we say has to be backed up by reality. We never "walk the talk". In the way, when one doesn't have that ability to get out and do, I think the essence of martial arts practice is lost. Much of what is said has to do with killing spare time and affirming one's own views, and very little to do with that visceral, heart-touching learning that occurs in a dojo.