If you have a job, you might not be aware of a program called Word World running in the mid afternoon on your local PBS station. Word World is an animated children's educational program that is supposed to teach kids how to spell. It tends to be charming and the animation is pretty good. But Word World is strange indeed. In Word World, there are free floating letters, and when organized into words, the letters become the thing that they spell. There are a variety lead characters in word world--a sheep formed of the letters S H E E P, a frog formed from the letters F R O G, and so on. Houses are formed from H O U S E, and you can imagine what red buildings are made from B A R N. With this general understanding in mind, I ask the following questions on the metaphysics of word world:
1. In Word World, does the creation of a word/item require some intent from the person forming the word, or does it simply happen spontaneously when letters are arranged appropriately? If no intention is required, won't word world be ultimately destroyed by an accidental B O M B?
2. In Word World, adding an "s" to any noun creates more and more of the noun without end. This happened in an episode with pizza. A few extra friends came over to Sheep's house, and in order to provide more food, he added an "s" to his pizza. The resulting pizzas spilled out of his house continually. If this is the case, then s's are the most dangerous letter in the alphabet.
3. Isn't word world essentially Marxist? After all, there are no industrial means of production, and there is no need for them. Any object or good one might possibly need can be created simply through arranging the appropriate letters. Frogs and Sheep and dogs are free to pursue their individual fulfillment without any hierarchical power structure. Education has set them free, and they have thrown off the chains of oppression. In short, spelling is important.
4. This, of course, begs the question of the where the free floating letters come from. Are they made in a factory? If so, who controls the factory? Given the way things work in Word World, couldn't you create more letters by arranging L E T T E R S? And if you did, how many letters would you get? In the pizzas episode, they made robots to eat all the pizzas. How do you get rid of letters? Can you create letter eating robots?
5. In word world, if a word is misspelled, it does not form the object you are intending to spell. But what about words that don't have consistent spelling, or spellings that are different in British and American English?
6. What about compound words? The use of 's' to create more pizzas suggests that letters can be added to already completed words. Would anyone ever want to spell "muskrat"? Wouldn't you get musk before you get muskrat?
7. What about nouns that are two separate words? Can you make a dung beetle in word world? Or will you only ever have some dung and a beetle?
8. Finally, the big questions. What happens if you spell "be"?
What about "truth"?
"Beauty"?
And the biggest of all: What happens if you spell "God"?
Things to ponder in your afternoon.
