Language is something that we are required to use in our everyday lives. We use it in many ways to describe things that we do in life, or things that have happened to us. When we use language though, we are presented with a problem. If we are able to describe everything that we do, we face the risk of generalizing it with language. Since describing an experience to someone is always a second-hand description is they were not there to experience this thing for themselves, the occurrence becomes generalized in our language. For most cases in our existence, language generalizes experience, but for some instances, it eludes the ability to even give a description.

        This argument can be taken many ways. To start out with, what do we mean when we say experience? In this context, experiences are the occurrences that happen in your life. To be a personal experience, three criteria must be met. First, it must have happened to you. You cannot expect something to be a personal experience if it has never happened to you. Second, you must have perceived it. If you never saw something, heard something, felts something, tasted something, or smelt something, then it cannot be classified as a personal experience. For example, if Johnny was walking down the street and a car splashed water all over him, that is his own personal experience of getting soaking wet. He saw and felt it most likely. The third requirement is that you must remember it. If you do not remember the thing happen to you, then who is to say that it happened or not? All these things are required to have a personal experience.

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        Now that experience has been adequately defined, how does language work against it? For starters, language can generalize experience. Language can do this in three ways: Repetition and Devaluing. To help explain these two concepts, let’s start out with an example story. Johnny has just had something amazing happen to him, he has just jumped non-stop with a jump rope 1001 times. Johnny is very proud of this personal experience and wants to share it with everybody because he is the very first one to jump 1001 times. He jumps online to post it on every social networking site under ...

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