words matter
If you didn’t want to look closely at your own organizational practices, if you felt uncomfortable about what younger works were agitating for, if you feared changed or anything that usurped your understanding of “how business is done” — Quiet Quitting was the easy answer.
Anne Helen Petersen • Bed Rotting and Loud Quitting
On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.
ed yong • What Counts as Seeing
In each of these projects I regularly found myself trying to convince friends, family, and potential future participants on the merits of these ideas. It was an uphill search for the words, frames, themes, and execution that would help others see it the way I or we did.
Yancey Strickler • When Your Purpose Is 1-of-1
Like an amulet worn around the neck, these words might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart. I also thought of it, and continue to think of it, as a matter of these verbal amulets shaping our perception of the world. They form our thinking, our feeling, and our imagination in such a way that
... See moreThe Convivial Society • Amulets Against the Spirits of the Age
Honest naming is a kind of ethical responsibility. We have a moral duty not to simply accept a harmful narrative, even if it comes cloaked in positive associations as a result of tradition, efforts by the powerful to preserve that power, or ignorance. We must not cave in to peer pressure from dead people.
Seth Goldenberg • Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures
Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence
Anna Wiener • The Age of Chat
Our language choices change how we use our time and energy. For every word we use to describe where we want to go, there's another word that we're walking away from.