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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.

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In Other Words draft