Language as Human Insight: Our Many Words for Fighting

Several years ago, I read an article in Harper's -- John Jeremiah Sullivan's gorgeous "Horseman, Pass By" -- that discussed, along with the bond between fathers and sons and the transcendence of Secretariat, the central role of of horses in human development and human imagination: this "verb made from flesh, this thing whose every atom wanted to run,"with "enormous eyes that always seem to see you no matter where you stand," that had carried riders across Eurasia and into history.

Thousands of years of symbiosis leave a trace. It shows up most clearly in the language, this deep familiarity, in all the excellent words. Beyond all the metaphors that have passed into our speech -- all the ponytails and tantivies, the horsebeans, horseleeches, and horselaughs, beyond all the junkies shooting white horse and all the cutpurses hung from the mare foaled of an acorn -- beyond that there is, most excellent of all, the terminology, the words we have evolved in order to live in such close association with these beings for such a long time, to be able to talk about them and what they do: piebald and roan, withers and farrier, crupper and martingale. A martian, equipped only with time and a dictionary, could reconstruct the history of the human race by looking for these proliferation-points of vocabulary, where the language suddenly explodes, signaling long intimacy, necessity.

As luck should have it, I had reason to search for synonyms for uproar today, which led me to a synonym search for fight. And witness the long intimacy, the necessity signaled there:

Altercate, assault, attack, bandy with, battle, bear arms, bicker, box, brawl, brush with, buck, challenge, clash, contend, cross swords, dispute, do battle, duel, exchange blows, feud, flare up, grapple, joust, meet, oppugn, ply weapons, protect, quarrel, repel, resist, rowdy, scrap, scuffle, skirmish, spar, strive, struggle, tiff, tilt, traverse, tug, tussle, wage war, war, withstand, wrangle, wrestle.
Buck, buckle down, carry on, combat, conduct, contest, continue, defy, effect, endure, engage in, exert oneself, fall out, force, further, hammer away, hassle, lay into, light into, maintain, oppose, persevere, persist, prosecute, push forward, repel, row, squabble, strive, struggle, support, take on, take pains, tangle with, toil on, travail, uphold, wage. Beat off, bottle up, check, contain, control, curb, fight off, hold back, oppose, reply, repress, repulse, resist, restrain, retaliate, stave off, ward off. Bout, duel, fight, fight game, fistic sport, fisticuffs, haymaker, match, prizefighting, pugilism, slugfest.
Conflict, encounter, engagement, fight, fighting, fray, skirmish, warfare. Aggressiveness, antagonism, belligerence, combativeness, destructiveness, dirty deed, fight, hostility, pugnacity, push. Armed fighting, armed hostilities, war, warfare. Fierce contest, intense battle, melee, pitched battle, riot, rumble. Altercate, argufy, brawl, caterwaul, cavil, dig, disagree, dispute, fall out, fight, hassle, pick at, quarrel, quibble, row, scrap, scrape, spar, spat, squabble, tiff, wrangle.

And that's just the start. The entry goes on ... and on ... and on. And it says a whole lot about what's made human beings human.

This isn't exactly a hard scientific insight, rather a bit of hypothetical sociolinguistic archaeology, but I wanted to share it anyways. In case that gets you down, keep in mind that there's even more words for love. So keep fighting the good fight....

Image: Albrecht Altdorfer, "The Battle of Alexander at Issus"

See Also:

• AAAS: The Death of Language
• Amazon Tribe Shakes Foundation of Modern Linguistics