words matter

“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of

Stiglitz employs Isaiah Berlin’s positive and negative freedoms, and later threads the needle: neoliberalism believes only in ‘freedom to do’, and disparages the need of government to constrain corporations and the wealthy for the good of the rest:

mientierra – from the Spanish miente (she/he lies) and tierra (land). It means "a false sense of solid ground beneath us", says Escott, to describe the experience of not being able to trust the land near a retreating coastline. It could also be applied as a metaphor for contemporary structures and systems that seem robust, but are not

The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.

“Quiet Quitting” started as a way for Gen-Zers to communicate with each other the reality that you can, in fact, not sublimate your entire identity and all of your time to a job and not get fired…..that you can just treat your job as a j-o-b, not as the sole determent of your value as a person…and that you can especially do this if your job treats

Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions.

Prompt power is not benign! The questions we ask ultimately determine the answers we find.

is it mere coincidence that these terms move further away from their specific usage and towards a neutered, politically neutral meaning?