words matter
Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Chat” evokes what search engines and databases cannot: a sense of personal involvement. It implicates one’s selfhood, which helps cultivate certain behaviors
Anna Wiener • The Age of Chat
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
It’s what makes women ‘power-hungry’ or ‘manipulative’ where men are ‘ambitious’ and ‘shrewd’.
Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
That final clarification is important. It is to say that language doesn’t simply allow us to describe reality as we experience it. Rather, it actively constitutes those experiences — it brings into being the everyday world for us: a world of tables and chairs, cats and dogs, planets, Great Aunt Jemima, and so on.
David Mattin • The Worlds to Come – Instalment One
One word does not capture the thing. One language does not hold all things. More words and different words mean more and different perspectives, which is an immediate widening of our world.
poetrynw.org • Magical Realism and the Sociology of Possibility
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
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
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