words matter
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
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
Everything that is spoken and can be spoken is merely a figurative term we use to nominate the unnamable, an inventory of “metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” that we have mistaken for the real and fixed. All we have is language and we cannot get beyond it.
Tan Tuck Ming • My Grandmother Glitches the Machine
The transformation of “gatekeeping” is, altogether, relatively benign, if not a little frustrating. But many of these linguistic changes create actual harm, especially as many of our watered-down words relate to identifying and challenging power.
charlie • Do Words Mean Anything Anymore?
To make diagnosis something ‘empowering’, the first step is to completely break it apart and acknowledge all of its potential different and conflicting functions. Diagnosis can give you access to community, or cut you off from community. It can give you access to benefits, or it can bar you from income through employment. It could get you your meds
... See moreDazed • This New Book Asks Whether Capitalism Really Is Driving Us All Crazy
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
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
“Linguistically, a duvet day feels gentle and generous, while rotting in bed conjures up a sense of decay, of life collapsing in on itself. Bed rotting doesn’t shy away from the sticky experience of staying in the same clothes all day or the lethargy that can come from lying down for hours on end.”
The grossness is the point — because, as O’Sullivan
... See more