words matter
In December of 2022, British contemporary artist Es Devlin installed a public sculpture in concert with the Endangered Language Alliance, “Your Voices,” outside of New York’s Lincoln Center. The work responds to anthropologist Wade Davis’s observation: “Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem ... See more
Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report
The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.
Seth Goldenberg • Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures
the online trend that links all of these disparate digi subcultures together: namecore, AKA the internet’s insatiable appetite for naming things.
Olive Pometsey • Namecore is the trend that unifies all trends
well-arranged words rearrange reality.
Visakan Veerasamy • Tweet
But when tokens could be literally anything, why are they currencies, points to be accumulated and POWER to be gained? I think it’s simply because these are the metaphors we all understand living under the sun of capitalism. What if instead of sending points you could send someone water or sunlight? Rather than having your power grow within a gover
... See moreAnna Rose • The Metaphors We Organise By
important to work with members of the public to coin words, rather than dreaming up new vocabulary on their own
Richard Fisher • Why We Need New Words for Life in the Anthropocene
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.
Abby Covert • How to Make Sense of Any Mess
to author more beautiful futures, we must imagine and express what a fundamentally different possibility might be. As the award-winning poet and author Ocean Vuong described with stunning clarity: We often tell our students, “The future is in your hands.” But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to
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