Conditioning

Deshoda listed the 100 most beautiful words in the English language, and guess what the first word is. Ailurophile, which means, a cat-lover! Yes! Now I just want to put myself in a situation where I can say, "Oh yes, I am an ailurophile." But then, most people probably won't know what I am talking about, because it's such an obscure word. As I was going through the rest of the list though, I noticed that a lot of the words sounded French, like "chatoyant" (I don't know French, so maybe that doesn't sound French at all, but to me it did), "denouement" (which I know for sure is derived from French) and "dulcet." This means that the person who put the list together must have been somewhat fond of the sound of French. I myself think French is a beautiful language and I absolutely love hearing it, but I've always wondered why French is such a popular language. A lot of people say it sounds beautiful, but is there a certain sound in French that is anthropologically appealing to the human ears, or are we conditioned to like French because of France's cultural prestige?

If the latter is true, it means that we have been culturally conditioned to like French. This idea sheds some light on the role of myth-breaking when it comes to book content. Books that break commonly believed ideas and throw the society into delicious controversy prevent us from being conditioned by a certain idea that limits our imagination into a tiny little box created by some guy in a suit. It's a necessary buffer from the invisible ignorance that we put over ourselves, invisible precisely because we think we know exactly what the circumstances are, but we fail to find other equally valid perspectives. And, myth-breaking books are popular, because people hate being conditioned despite the fact that they are tremendously vulnerable to conditioning. We seem to be in a constant struggle against the information that is thrown to us; we swallow them like ravenous kids, but at the same time, we want to throw it all back up and say that we are adults who can resist that tempting, but ultimately boring food. But, let me by cynical here and say that we are still eating without really thinking, and our desire to resist being conditioned by a certain idea is smothered by our too easy belief in what the masses believe.

But, going back to French, even if this is cultural conditioning at work, I still love the sound of it. I will just accept that I am being conditioned, despite the fact that this acceptance might make my previous paragraph hypocritical or invalid :)  But, every time I think that French is beautiful, I can't stop myself from thinking about what I've just discussed.