language
Sometimes you want to say things, and you’re missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist.
And so, while language is necessary, it does a disservice to reality. In attempting to describe the indescribable, words constrain reality. Through simplifications, generalizations, and connotations they mischaracterize and water it down. They fail to capture the complexity, uniqueness, and dynamism of life. And as a result, we never truly see,... See more
The Pursuit
Protagoras observed a strange paradox about language. Despite the perpetual flux and change of the physical world, language lends the mistaken impression that the world is not in flux, that it is stable. As the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles had observed only a few years before, ‘there is no birth for any mortal thing, nor any cursed end in
... See moreRobin Reames • Ancient Greek Antilogic Is the Craft of Suspending Judgment
Untranslatable
untranslatable.co
an online dictionary of idioms and expressions contributed by native speakers all over the world
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;... 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;... See more
Nicole Fenton • Words as Material
“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Disgrace Quotes by J.M. Coetzee
“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the... See more