language
To share parts of ourselves as a way of undoing aloneness, as a method of connection, as a form of putting words to something someone else might not yet have the words for, feels like shining a flashlight on something that would otherwise stay hidden, or as Ocean Vuong said, building fire escapes for each other.
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.
“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
The Master and His Emissary Quotes by Iain McGilchrist
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
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
To give birth, to nourish,
to bear and not to own,
to act and not lay claim,
to lead and not to rule:
this is mysterious power.
to bear and not to own,
to act and not lay claim,
to lead and not to rule:
this is mysterious power.