— 1 —
I have always been very passionate about words. As I said in the library ethos, I grew up reading books and have strong feelings about them.
Every word has a family, and a history. Lots of words are made up of other words, or parts of other words. Every word has more nuance and potential in it than the typical word user tends to realize.
Rather than learn lots of new words as independent entities (which can also be fun), I like to understand how words work and come together. You can become more artful by simply better understanding the words that you already use. (As I write this – recently I’ve been practicing music, and the lesson is the same. There are only so many notes in music. Becoming a more skillful musician is largely about better understanding the notes you’re already playing, and the intervals between them. A lot of musicians, myself included, would get a lot better if we learned to play less. But knowing precisely how to use silences in the right place, of the right lengths, that’s not as easy.)
Big words can be easy to read if the delivery is clear.
George Orwell had a great essay titled Politics and the English Language, where he described how language decays with misuse, and how we can counter that by being thoughtful with our utterances.
A handful of well-chosen words can change your life. In the famous story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, there’s a magical phrase – “open sesame” – that, when spoken, literally opens a secret passage to a hidden treasure. While it’ll be hard to find any similarly convenient two-word magic phrases in everyday life, it’s true that good phrases can work like passwords, or shibboleths, that distinguish insiders from outsiders, the “people who know” and the people who don’t.
The rules of language are largely intersubjective.
Language is an infinite, massive multiplayer game of persuasion. It’s fashion and politics. We try on new words to try and make them happen, and whether they catch on or not depends on whether other people agree with our assessment that some configuration is particularly fetch.
Every word is a roughly-hewn representation of an idea, with people having some vague consensus about what it means. We stretch, distort, invert, resist, question, argue. This is all part of the process. Words don’t exist independent of the people who use them.
All words are made up.
A book is a set of ordered words, and those words represent a series of propositions, a series of invitations – and what is said sits not just on its own, but in contrast and complement to everything else that has ever been said. A book is a way of seeing.
A good writer is, amongst other things, someone who cares deeply about the meaning of words, and through artful usage, persuades others to be more thoughtful and nuanced.
My goal in life is to be a word-artist-magician. Words are proxies for thoughts, and a master manipulator of words is a skilled navigator in the tumultuous ocean of meaning. We use our words to sail the oceanic mind of humanity.
A writer is a maniac who toils laboriously — to assemble a sequence of squiggles — that generate a parlor of hallucinations — in an attempt to jailbreak her own mind — out of the prison of her subvocalizations. “What’s the point of that?” Art has many utilities, but the chief utility is freedom from being shackled to narrow, utilitarian questions like “what’s the point”. We don’t know what the point is, that’s the fun of it. We don’t know what’s outside; the point is to find out.
It’s remarkable to me how it’s ultimately a very small set of words – a few thousand, maybe – presented as tweets and/or blogposts, that have been responsible for so much of the goodness in my life – people, relationships, opportunities, wealth.
Writing can be an act of compression, reproducing signal with less noise. It always you to think clearly without most of the inelegant clutter of other people’s words. “Inelegant clutter” is a semi-subjective thing, since words are made up of other words, ideas are made up of other ideas, models are made up of other models. What is elegant to one person might be inscrutable to another.
Because we are social creatures using a communal language pool, personal sense-making – sharpening your own thinking by being thoughtful about your own use of words – is something that can benefit others. This is part of the fun of writing.
— 2 —
Aug2023: This threadpost will likely eventually become part of a substack essay I’ve been stewing on titled “In other words”, will link when it’s done.
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)
(random link re: a possible orwell/russell correspondence)
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(2025jan12) Before we go any further I want to lay out all the posts that were previously categorized as wordmagic posts. From oldest to most recent:
- Is Ya Kun Kaya Toast authentic? – what does authenticity really mean?
- my 2016 rewrite of George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language
- smart writing is about cultivating taste, suspending judgement and chasing your curiosity – includes “FAQs on cultivating taste”
- talking to people makes you a better writer, or ‘talking for writers’, which challenges you to make your writing more people-shaped
- stub: magic junkyard
- nov2020 talking points
- a loose set of notes about aesthetics
- iconography – I believe successful icons can be reverse-engineered
- everything is a remix – an excuse to talk about one of my favorite videos, about one of my favorite ideas, which greatly relieved my creative anxiety, permanently
- memed into existence – a list of examples of the phrase in use
- obliqueness – important
- comms is lossy – all commmunication is approximation. misunderstanding is the default state. this itself is misunderstood, because misunderstanding is the default state. one of the more important posts in this category.
- ayy lmao — I should tell the story of this meme
- write your memoirs
- pyschofauna – stub
- joke about outcomes you want – stub, an example of word magic
- attention metrics – partially about avoiding audience capture, and avoiding the tyranny of pandering to Most People
- journalling – stub
- discourse cycles – stub
- you can look it up – about not having to explain everything
On my next review of this post I’ll reorganize the order, maybe merge some stuff
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In Other Words draft
— 3 —
words of power
Original thread here.
I loved reading, all my life. Books gave me an interiority; entire multiverses within myself that no authority could take from me. They kept me sane in a truer and more timeless sense than the popular, superficial, faddish conceptions of “realistic” that I was bombarded with IRL.
I wrote casually throughout my teens. It didn’t feel like a conscious choice at first. It felt like breathing. I love words, and so I inhale them, and they swirl around the vortex of my being, enriching and nourishing me, and then I exhale them. Been doing this for decades now.
When I was about 19, I grew conscious of the fact that this was something that I was increasingly specialised in, something I truly loved, something I’m good at, something I wanted to get better at all my life. So I committed myself to writing and publishing One Million Words.
Someone recently asked me, why did you do it? what was your motivation? and the interesting thing here is that I couldn’t entirely articulate my motivation when I started. simplistically, I knew I loved words, and I wanted to become a better writer, and that *was* enough for me.
But I got out of bed to pace my living room at 620am because I feel like some of that has just revealed itself to me. And I’m sure I’ve kinda-sorta written about this before – you can append this caveat to everything I write – I’ve always written some version of it before…
Writing is a way for me to figure myself out. And I mean something very precise by that. I experiment with hundreds of thousands of phrases to find a handful of what we’ll call Words Of Power – phrases that have searing resonance with my entire being. This resonance is everything: it’s intellectual, it’s psychological, it’s emotional. It animates me. Literally, it wakes me from my sleep and has me pacing the house with a manic intensity while the world around me is in a dark and silent slumber.
I can spend hours ruminating on a single word, studying its history, learning about where it’s from, where it’s been, breaking down its components, teasing out its subtler connotations. The spirit of words is revealed to me, as a painter sees light, as a musician hears sound.
I’ve spent the last 3 years working on a book. It’s the best and most potent thing I’ve ever written. It’s also not nearly as good as I think it could be. Parts of it feel dead and opaque to me relative to what I feel in my heart, see in my mind. Nevertheless, I am proud of it. The book is my clunky attempt to share the spirit magic of words with others, and in my assessment, it’s… a decent enough attempt. But the book itself is not nearly as important as the internal transformation I have gone through in order to bring it to life.
To turn into a 🦋, a 🐛 must first go through a process of disintegration. It forms a protective cocoon to do this in, and then it actually digests itself. To this I say: Big Mood. I turned up my attention on itself, then turned it up to 11, and the result has been cataclysmic.
I still haven’t said what I got up to say 😂 felt compelled to do all this poetic setup. The thing I want to say is the the Words Of Power allow me to cleave my reality at the joints. They allow me to manipulate the Matrix of my psyche. They allow me to channel my emotions. What I knew but couldn’t articulate when I started, is that in words I would find the magic I needed to set myself free. And the fact that I can articulate it now is itself part of the proof. I am a surfer of the chaotic utterances of the megamind.
(jul2018: My goal in life is to be a word artist-magician. Words are proxies for thoughts, and a master manipulator of words is a skilled navigator in the tumultuous ocean of meaning. Moana, but the ocean is the mind of humanity)
When it comes to words, I am a tuning fork, I am a chiropractor, I am a songstress, I am a priest. I birth worlds, I lead armies, I entertain children, I heal the sick. I am life and I am death and I am all of creation echoing through eternity through this singular moment.
(oct 2019: I am never truly alone, for I have the light of human consciousness pulsing through my nerves. I am a verse in a song that echoes through millennia. I am Feynman and Archimedes, I am laughter and joy, curiosity and awe, discovery and delight… anyway, support your local library)
And I have barely gotten started. 5 years from now, I will laugh heartily at how clunky and inelegant my writing here is. And 50 years from now I will be something I cannot even begin to conceive. It is a strange and terrible and beautiful and glorious thing, to feel this resonance through space and time, through the power of the word. When I quiet myself and really listen, I can hear the world rearranging itself around words of power. It already is. Always has been.
— 4. how to name things —
(abandoned substack draft, 12apr2023)
thinking is easy, information architecture is hard
Noticed several of my creative friends all dealing with similar struggles recently. And maybe what I’m really seeing is a reflection of myself in them. They’re creative, entrepreneurial, playful souls who are dealing with the challenges of having had some moderate success in some domain, and trying to find a way to honor their existing work while also breaking free and doing whatever their hearts really want. It’s a challenge! There’s a tension there. Both things don’t easily coexist. But they can coexist, it just takes… I wanna say it just takes cleverness (in the ‘cunning’ sense), but that’s not entirely it. It takes open-heartedness, a willingness to expand one’s awareness…
I have a friend who wants to write poems but worries that people will criticize them harshly and think less of them for it, and also disrespect the intimacy
I have another friend who wants to tell the story of their journey, but worries that… people will criticize them harshly, think less of them for it, disrespect the intimacy
The generic response you’ll often get to this might be something like, “well, toughen up! face the criticism and do it anyway! don’t let their disrespect discourage you!” – and there’s definitely something to that, but it’s not quite enough, I think. I think there’s something smart and sensitive about wanting to protect your intimate work from being disrespected
Petals for Armor
David Bowie sensitive
I’ve noticed that it’s easier for me to use some of my voice in some contexts than others. When I make memes, for example, I sometimes like to be more expressive and use more ornate language. Sometimes ornate language gets interpreted as pretentious. Sometimes it is! Sometimes it’s overwrought. But sometimes its the actual best way to convey something in a particular way. The insight that I’m trying to convey here is… instead of grumbling that tweeting in an ornate way gets misunderstood, make memes instead.
I’m reminded now of an ad for a Masterclass by RuPaul. He said, “Wear a suit. You want to make more money? You like money? Wear a suit. Put yourself together. People respond to it. It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the narrative that’s already implanted in people’s consciousness. You don’t want to swim upstream. You want to work with what people already know. You can use that tool to get what you want out of this life.”
Sure you could be annoyed that people feel more comfortable giving money to someone in a suit than someone in a ratty t-shirt. But do you want to be annoyed or do you want to make money? You can make money first, and then complain about this dynamic afterwards, from a position of strength rather than a position of weakness.
How to ask for money: allelujah brothers and sisters
// abandoned
— 5. bro just describe things —
29apr2023
Here is some advice for myself. Just describe things. Get back into the heart of yourself, feel what you feel, inhabit your body and write from your heart to your fingers.
Commutes, what were they like? Stepping out the front door always feels like a transition. I spent so much time at home even before the pandemic. There’s two parts to it.
I do a lot of my most intense, urgent writing on my phone while I pacing my kitchen.
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
How can I be a better friend to myself?
How can I be a better partner to myself
Make clearer requests
Ideate a bunch of substack essay ideas
You’ve done that before, why wasn’t it enough? Maybe: didn’t sufficiently work backwards from outcome? Wasn’t people-shaped?
Get your motor running (moved to standalone page)
…
Ok I fucked up here lol I tried to switch from my phone to my computer and my notes app wasn’t syncing and so I ended up going on Twitter for an hour… rip
0850 – just describe stuff bro nov2023
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“i have strong feelings about words” twitter thread