Conceptless

One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much recently is that blogger is blocked at my school, so it’s impossible to post during the hours I’m normally sitting in front of a computer. A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog (never posted) about how we had once again come to the magical time in Korea when the windows are open. Windows here are opened in the fall - in the cold -for the fresh air. It’s an odd feeling to walk into a room on a chilly fall day to find the windows open and your coworkers wearing their coats and using their space heaters. It’s odder when they complain about how cold it is after opening the windows. If ever there was an argument against Darwin’s natural selection, I think this might be it. Currently it’s -5 Celsius, and both Paul and I are sitting with windows open; my school has fortunately turned on the heat, his has not.

Yesterday, in class, some students asked about the word “conceptless,” which they had heard on Korean television. They said that they had looked it up, but couldn’t find it in their dictionary. My coteacher wrote it on the board and asked me about it. I said I didn’t think it was a real word, but if it was, it could only be used to describe things, such as books or movies, rather than people; I volunteered the word clueless instead.

When we returned to our office, I looked up the word online. It wasn’t on Merriam-Webster’s website, or dictionary.com; when I googled the word, nothing came up. My coworker, using a Korean search engine, managed to find some philosophy papers that used the word conceptless. I attempted to explain that once you were a philosopher, you had to make words up to describe things, but that since it wasn’t in the dictionary, it still wasn’t a word. She argued that Koreans could make up the word, then, since it was a direct translation of a word they use. “A concept,” she argued, “is a general idea, like ‘we need food to live.’”

“A concept is really just an idea.”

“No, it says here it’s a general idea, so that’s something everyone knows like how to behave.’”

“General idea really just means an idea, not something everyone shares.”

“No, the Korean word is _______, and we translate that as concept, so conceptless is a person who doesn’t behave properly.”

Eventually, I just dropped it. I'm in Korea, she's older than I am, there's no telling her she's wrong. I bit my tongue, and went on to the next thing.