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(2025mar22) I’m revisiting this document with the thought that people are typically more interested in problems than in general descriptions of things. What’s the problem that got me into ‘word magic’? If I had to guess, it all began with confusions and misunderstandings. Skimming the rest of this post, I note talk about freedom from authority, freedom to figure myself out. Words were my way out of feeling powerless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have always been very passionate about words. As I said in the library ethos<\/a>, I grew up reading books and have strong feelings about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 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<\/em>. But knowing precisely how to use silences in the right place, of the right lengths, that’s not as easy.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Big words can be easy to read if the delivery is clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n George Orwell had a great essay titled Politics and the English Language<\/a>, where he described how language decays with misuse, and how we can counter that by being thoughtful with our utterances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 “open sesame” \u2013 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<\/em>, that distinguish insiders from outsiders, the “people who know” and the people who don’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rules of language are largely intersubjective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All words are made up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A book is a set of ordered words, and those words represent a series of propositions, a series of invitations \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A writer is a maniac who toils laboriously \u2014 to assemble a sequence of squiggles \u2014 that generate a parlor of hallucinations \u2014 in an attempt to jailbreak her own mind \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s remarkable to me how it’s ultimately a very small set of words \u2013 a few thousand, maybe \u2013 presented as tweets and\/or blogposts, that have been responsible for so much of the goodness in my life \u2013 people, relationships, opportunities, wealth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because we are social creatures using a communal language pool, personal sense-making \u2013 sharpening your own thinking by being thoughtful about your own use of words \u2013 is something that can benefit others. This is part of the fun of writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aug2023: This threadpost will likely eventually become part of a substack essay I\u2019ve been stewing on titled \u201cIn other words\u201d, will link when it\u2019s done.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A big part of why I write is so I can think clearly without all of the inelegant clutter of most people<\/a>\u2019s words, and models. It\u2019s an act of compression. My goal is often to reproduce signal with less noise. (\u201cInelegant clutter\u201d is also quite a semi-subjective thing \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bertrand Russell and George Orwell both had riffs related to this: if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Russell\u2019s point was more about the limits of language, and of knowledge \u2013 how we don\u2019t even really know what we think until we attempt to articulate ourselves and find our articulations dissatisfactory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEverything 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas Orwell\u2019s point is political \u2013 he argued that<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Mead: \u201cNever doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it\u2019s the only thing that ever has.\u201d<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Borges was clued in too.\u201cThe task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us\u2026 into something which can last in man\u2019s memory.\u201d<\/em> Artists are in the business of remembrance. They tend to the connective tissue that holds us together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n William Faulkner, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Faulkner: \u201cThe past is never dead. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CS Lewis: \u201cThe 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\u2026 useless synonyms for good or for bad.\u201d<\/em> (Source: Studies in Words)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \/\/ tbc<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Original Twitter thread here<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n (random link re: a possible orwell\/russell correspondence<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n (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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n On my next review of this post I’ll reorganize the order, maybe merge some stuff<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u2014 3 \u2014<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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