The Pursuit
thepursuit.io
The Pursuit
That final clarification is important. It is to say that language doesn’t simply allow us to describe reality as we experience it. Rather, it actively constitutes those experiences — it brings into being the everyday world for us: a world of tables and chairs, cats and dogs, planets, Great Aunt Jemima, and so on.
David Mattin • The Worlds to Come – Instalment One
Words shape our ideas, how we see the world, and how we relate to one another. As design teacher and researcher Anne Galloway says:
Language makes it possible for us to navigate places and relationships; to express needs and requirements; t... See more
“Language doesn’t just make things—it assembles, cobbles together, entire worlds and all the relations within.”
Language makes it possible for us to navigate places and relationships; to express needs and requirements; t... See more
Matt Felten • Words as Material
Can language accurately represent reality, or does it inherently distort our understanding of the world?
World we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem
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
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
words contribute to the compression of even more expressive ideas within the special reality of the World. They can signal members from non members. They shape an aesthetic of the World like the calls and songs of a bird species cutting through the noise of the jungle.
Ian Cheng • Emissary's Guide To Worlding
We, as humans, sometimes receive streams of tokens and produce tokens in response, forming words, sentences, lines of code ... but always with the ability to peek outside the stream and check in with ground-floor reality. We pause and consider: does this word really stand for the thing I intend it to stand for? Does this sentence capture the real e... See more