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 – 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.

Faulkner: “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.

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)

// tbc

(Original Twitter thread here)