This world has lost its glory / Let’s start a brand new story now, my love…
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
It’s amazing what we can do with words. Words do tend to lose their lustre when they’re used casually – “amazing” has come to mean “nice” or “cool”, when its deeper, obscured meaning is in plain sight: to “a-maze” was to daze, confound, bewilder. Personally I always find myself conflicted about how people use words. Most people use them carelessly, which is their right.
Every word is a set of squiggles with a history. Even if we limit ourselves just to English, there are many Englishes.
I want to use words in novel ways to conjure new images – be really experimental and create something new.
what are all the things to talk about
- blast from a trumpet
- godly sheen dust
- vocabulary
- a lot of our concepts are broken/wrong
- translation, violin
- importance of being oblique
A grammar of one’s own:
Camille paglia – PC
“Everything is a vague to a degree you Bertrand russell – vague
George orwell – battlefield
James baldwin? –
[comments?] I’ve spilled a lot of metaphorical ink over the years writing about how much I love words, and writing. When I loosely analyzed my “lets write 1000 essays of 1000 words each” project, I found that it accounted for about ~7-8% of my writing. Which I think is a fairly reasonable amount of self-reflexive to be. I would be annoyed if it were much more than that. But I always would like some meta-commentary, I want to know what the author is thinking while they’re writing the thing.
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I finally figured out the question I wish someone would ask me, or the observation I wish someone would make, which is how careful I am to avoid using any of the labels that are thrown around in culture wars. Racism sexism feminism capitalism communism religion spirituality etc
I believe in trying to talk about these things with the starting assumption that I don’t know what the word means and that I have to derive everything from what I personally know. “Liberalism conservatism left right red blue woke cancel” none of these words mean anything to me
“Are you worried about being cancelled” I don’t know what that means!! Do you mean I say something that offends some group of motivated people who are eager to cause me personal harm? I have worked to design my life to avoid being at the mercy of other people’s whims
“Are you more worried about the wokes or the alt right” again I have no idea wtf any of this means, you’ll have to be more specific. What are the precise, specific outcomes we are concerned about here? If you define your problems well it’s easier to address them
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[cracks knuckles] ok let me try and fit FAN into this frame
the big world problem is, in a handful of words: fragmentation, disorientation, disillusionment, alienation, loneliness, distrust, despair
FAN is a kind of bottom-up chaos-surfing syncretic MMA-dance to address 👆🏾
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sometimes a little rephrase makes things much more agreeable
eg saying “stress is the cause of health problems” is disputable
“stress often makes health problems worse, and stress relief often makes health problems less bad” is easier to agree with
if you get better with words you might realize you could say catalyst instead of cause, ie “stress is a catalyst in health problems”
dexterity and nimbleness is very useful to have in the domain of speech and writing
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mind glitches: one interesting one is when you’re careful to avoid using a word, and the other person uses it at you. its an accidental reveal of cached thinking. If you’re careful with your words you can see who’s really listening to you and who’s glazed over
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“This world has lost its glory /
Let’s start a brand new story now, my love…”
– Words, Bee Gees (1962)
Author’s personal preamble: This is one of a set of essays that I’ve been trying to write for ages. I have to make my peace with the fact that I’m not going to do the perfect job that I envision in my mind. I have to resort to a bunch of guiding questions like, “Why am I writing this? Why does this essay want to exist?” And there are many answers to that, but the one that I think is most significant right now is that I simply want to persuade people to experiment more with their language. Why do I want to do that? Selfishly because I think it’ll make for a more interesting world for me to inhabit. I write this primarily for my friends and peers, and I’d like to see them experiment more with their language. Less selfishly though, I do honestly think it’ll benefit everyone, in almost every dimension. So why aren’t people already doing it? I suppose it’s because most people just never got around to thinking about it. I am sort of an outlier in that I read a lot as a kid, have written a lot over the years, and have direct personal experience with the power of the word.
Is it realistic to expect everyone to want to become word-magicians? Of course not. Ultimately each person should probably specialize in whatever makes their heart sing, whatever they are personally suited to do. But I’d like people to at least appreciate the power of words better, the same way a chef might want you to appreciate good food better, even if you’re never actually going to seriously pursue the culinary arts yourself. Appreciation counts for something. I don’t necessarily expect every reader to become a chef themselves – but I think it’s quite likely that a lot of my readers are “chef-curious”. Which brings me to an ongoing tension in my work. I want my writing to be accessible, but I also want it to be good. All creatives grapple with this in some sense, but again, we must each do what our hearts dictate. Mine tells me that… I have spent years trying to explain things to people who didn’t get it – and that was quite worthwhile, actually, because it helped
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language is a massive multiplayer game we are all playing together
One of my favorite books is The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), by Lewis Thomas. It’s really a collection of 29 essays. I first read it when I was about 20 years old, and I remember reveling in the author’s wide range of interests and perspectives. The book is primarily about biology, but it’s also about music, and language, and ecosystems, and societies— it’s a book about something that ends up being a book about everything. I mention this book because Thomas influenced my thinking about the massive multiplayer nature of language. Every one of us contributes to language, simply by speaking and writing. Some of us are disproportionately more influential than others, and this is something we can actively strive to do. We can do it well or we can do it poorly. Here I think I might segue to talking about Orwell and Russell…
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if you’re precise about what you mean and choose your words carefully you can improve language just by speaking and writing
A big part of why I write is so I can think clearly without all of the inelegant clutter of most people’s words, and models. It’s an act of compression. My goal is often to reproduce signal with less noise. (“Inelegant clutter” is also quite a semi-subjective thing – words are made up of other words, ideas of other ideas, models of other models. What is elegant to one person might be inscrutable to another. Interestingly though, (partially?) because we are social creatures using a communal language pool, personal sense-making, when shared, can also benefit others.
Bertrand Russell and George Orwell both had riffs related to this: if you’re precise about what you mean, and choose your words carefully, you end up improving language just by speaking and writing. This happens largely because other thoughtful players validate your choices as good ones.
Russell’s point was more about the limits of language, and of knowledge – how we don’t even really know what we think until we attempt to articulate ourselves and find our articulations dissatisfactory:
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think.”
Whereas Orwell’s point is political – in his essay Politics and The English Language (1946), he argued that the quality of a language rises and falls in tandem with the quality of the society that uses it. Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking and vice versa, each becoming a catalyst for the other.
The implications here are staggering. it suggests that a handful of people being uncommonly, persistently deliberate in their work can have a transformative effect on society. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, perhaps its the only thing that ever has.
(Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”)
Borges was clued in too.“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us… into something which can last in man’s memory.” Artists are in the business of remembrance. They tend to the connective tissue that holds us together.
William Faulkner, too: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates back to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”
And countless other artists throughout history, many of them nameless, forgotten, unappreciated. We honor them in our work. They who sang and danced and kept the flame of human consciousness alight, amidst wretchedness and despair.
I have a whole nother essay I’ve been wanting to write called “just describe stuff bro”, and maybe it should just be condensed into a section in this essay.
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Just Describe Stuff Bro
CS Lewis: “The greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become… useless synonyms for good or for bad.” (Source: Studies in Words)
“advice for myself: describe things. Get back into the heart of yourself, feel what you feel, inhabit your body and write from your heart to your fingers……. I did a consult call and Describe Things came up. It occurs to me that if I describe my calls better, I’d get more clients. Because they’d have a clearer picture of what they’re opting in to. Most of my clients are people who are familiar with my work. It would be helpful to make a list of the books that I’m familiar with…. I wanna describe my calls better so I can get more clients…. help more people…. make more money…..
Storytelling is always a good way to contextualize things. I was watching a documentary. I was talking to someone. It occurred to me. Woke up with the idea… been thinking lately…
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Every word is a roughly-hewn representation of an idea, with some vague consensus about what it means. We stretch, distort, invert, resist. Words don’t have static meanings, not for very long. Sometimes a word comes to mean the complete opposite of what it meant before. The word “literally”, often used figuratively, also means “not literally”. Some people find this agonizing, and a sign that language is broken, or that people are cursed. I’d say… sometimes. Maybe. It depends on the context. Subverting language is one of the top uses of language. Subverting a word is a way of signalling to an ingroup “we are the people for whom this word means something differently than what it means for others”. This is part of how reclaiming slurs work, and why “some people are allowed to use it and others aren’t”. It kinda depends on which side of the group you’re on.
Dictionaries are history books. They attempt to capture…
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Changing your vocabulary is the most cheat-code-esque way to change your life I can think of and it’s perfectly legal. Sometimes the point of reinventing a thing is just to start fresh without the baggage of old connotations. this is also why it’s actually great to switch to a new note-taking app every 2-3 years
changing your vocabulary can be a starting point for changing your entire model(s) of reality. a lot of the main roads are congested beyond belief, but it’s possible to cut through the back alleys and crooked paths
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One of the best things I’ve written for myself is an essay from before I started my substack, titled The Library Ethos. I’m very proud of it, because I think it does a pretty good job of capturing what I care about, and arguably, who I am. I find myself thinking now about why I even wrote it. A part of me has always wanted to write my memoirs. The library feels like an important part of my origin story, in multiple senses. I spent my formative years in libraries and they shaped how I think, how I conceive of reality.
As I begin work on this essay– In Other Words – not sure yet if I want to capitalize the words – it’s funny and striking to me that this one is an obvious followup. I have a tweet from July 2018 that I have hotkeyed both literally and mentally as “word artist magician”, and it’s quite foundational to everything I do.
The above essay and tweet establish quite clearly that I am “meant” to be an author. In my first substack essay, We Were Voyagers, I talk about the Aldine Press, and how its founder Aldus Manutius is a friend to all books and libraries until the end of time. It’s all so clear to me right now.
I have strong feelings about words. I have a thread about George Orwell and Bertrand Russell and I’ve quoted Borges, Faulkner, Sagan.
“there’s some set of words in your subconscious that, if you said them out loud in the right way, would rearrange your entire reality. what are they?”
“in my experience, if you write a million words of stream-of-consciousness you’ll likely find that you tend to gravitate around, like, 12-16 things”
Hypertext: When I was about 8 years old and I first sat at a computer and typed words into a forum and got replies from people elsewhere in the world, I swear on my life I instantly knew I had found The Holy Grail
“fictions and illusions can be some of the realest things, in some ways more real than sticks and stones. sticks and stones may break my bones, but words make up ontology.”
For me, every essay I’ve written is a kind of puzzle. It’s self-authored. I get to use my symbols and squiggles to conjure up a vivid hallucination which feels like it corresponds to varying parts of my reality and/or unreality.
Inspiration for the title of this essay? I like that the phrase “in other words” is something that comes up naturally in common speech. People say something, and then they say “in other words,” before using a different set of words to say the same thing. Why bother? Why is it helpful to say something in two or more different ways? It’s roughly similar to why it’s helpful to have two eyes and two ears. When we have two slightly different… sensor-things… they allow us to perceive slight differences. This gives us the perception of depth, distance, allowing us to do all sorts of clever math, triangulating our relative position… this is important stuff for voyagers. If you want to go somewhere, it’s pretty helpful to know where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going.
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If you spend a lot of time working with words, you do come to see their limitations. I have a 2019 tweet that says, “current mood: nothing is properly knowable or sayable and all the words are wrong”. But this is true for all mediums. Painters come to see the limits of paint. Musicians come to see the limits of sound. The magic of art is that somehow, sometimes, we are able to transcend the limitations of bandwidth and get a beautiful thing across.
“some of yall should reduce your twitter usage by ~98% and instead read 100 good books and write 500,000 words of introspective journalling and then you can return with real textual finesse” – what exactly do I mean by “real textual finesse”? It means understanding how words work. I’m reminded of someone saying of a painter that they were one of the few people who really understood color and light.
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oneliner about hypertext
a paragraph about hypertext. I was going to save this for a separate essay, but what if it were just a few sentences? Alright. What is hypertext? Hypertext is text that links directly to other text. There is no text that stands alone that isn’t a wave in a greater ocean. If an author wanted to hide their references, their sources, their influences, they could take some pains to do that. You could be deliberate about mentioning your sources, citing them. The internet now allows us to link directly to them, reducing the time and effort required to hunt down a thing to near zero.
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Footnotes?