inarticulable knowledge

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“…there’s a huge blind spot in the language of emotion, vast holes in the lexicon that we don’t even know we’re missing. We have…only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience. Words will never do us justice, but we have to try anyway.”

Seth T. Harrell • Affective Foresight

Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the ... See more

Maria Popova • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name

Wittgenstein said that “you cannot enter worlds for which you do not have the language.” Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, discusses how learning the language of birders helped her distinguish better between different birds. One of the most pleasurable parts of learning a new domain for me is developing the language that accompanies the developmen... See more

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”

― Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires

Ineffability. — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In th

Maria Popova • William James on Consciousness and the Four Features of Transcendent Experiences

To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of r... See more

Maria Popova • The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable About the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself

This matters, because language is a form of power. It creates categories that help us interpret the world, and that which is not easily available in language is often ignored in thought itself. A shared vocabulary makes ideas more accessible while a lack of language can render an experience illegible. It can isolate.

Angela Chen • Ace