Sublime

In language, it helps to think of word as an approximate notion.

• Words no human would say: These exist only in journalism, academia, think tanks and research papers. When we worked in newspapers, sharp editors called these “journalese”—a dying language, thankfully. discourse (talk) challenge (problem, shitshow)

Language did not function as a storehouse of words, from which users could summon the correct items, preformed. On the contrary, words were fugitive, on the fly, expected to vanish again thereafter. When spoken, they were not available to be compared with, or measured against, other instantiations of themselves.

But according to a growing body of evidence, the decline in the rate of language learning around age 18 is not a feature of our biology. It’s a bug in our education.

“natural semantic metalanguage” (NSM). It is natural because it takes its elements from real human language only.§ And it contains some surprises: as well as “adult,” not all languages have words for “male” and “female”—meaning that these cannot be semantic elements, or, as Wierzbicka calls them, “primes.”

When it comes to language, people are slow to change and quick to argue.

Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in;