Recently mariner shared with his readers a sound that might be a word. His friend, a language guru, shared it with mariner. The word is ‘tryna’ (trying to). As readers know, mariner uses hearing aids with less than accurate reception. What he hears most often is a slurred noise which he must presume is words. He and his friend collect the most garbled words they hear. The original word collected was ‘skoeet’.

Since he was introduced to ‘tryna’, mariner has been thinking about the reason human monkeys slur every language. It is accurate to say that humans possess a deeper intelligence than monkeys, thereby busying themselves with the concept of shapes called letters that represent sounds. With better imagination, humans even use pictures to represent sounds, e.g., emojis and other drawn representations. Is the word for a hand print on the cave wall ‘me’?

While monkeys and humans have quite different brains, they have almost identical anatomy when it comes to making noises – especially communication noises (even whales have communication noises). Is human slurring a desire to use anatomically comfortable noises just like monkeys? Is the idea of conjuring letters as sounds an imposition? Mariner duno.

Ancient Mariner