Language Care As Culture Care
Three traps to avoid for a better future
Hello friends,
Hope you all had a lovely weekend. I want to extend a large and heartfelt welcome to our new subscribers. These days, filtering the content that comes your way is a legitimate chore, so I don’t take it for granted that you would allow me direct access to your inbox — thank you.
I hope that my newsletters can add some texture to your life, expand your curiosity, and help restore that wonderful feeling of awareness. If you have not yet subscribed, please consider doing so by clicking the button below. You can always reverse your decision later! This week, I want to draw attention to something that, despite coming from right beneath our noses, often escapes notice. Our language. This post is just a brief adumbration for this very extensive topic, but I think you will enjoy some thoughts on why intentionality with our words is crucial for a robust experience of the world. We will start with a famous quote from Wittgenstein.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language is in the Care of Your Writers
In a 2016 trip to Asia, I heard an intriguing piece of trivia about the Soviet Union’s occupation of Mongolia. The Soviets purportedly enacted a variety of tactics to prevent the country's people from organizing resistance groups. One of these tactics was to outlaw and erase specific words from the Mongolian language, words like: strategy, rebellion, leadership, uprising. The underlying philosophy was that by removing these words from the language, the Soviet’s could prevent the Mongols from embodying the meanings. This was a part of a broader effort where they also removed references to Ghengis Khan, burned national history books, and stole artifacts that might catalyze a sense of national camaraderie. So by censoring words like strategy, they hoped to block the ability to form a strategy, and therefore avoid attempts to assemble an intentional rebellion because that which is unmentionable is generally unattainable. If you are a fan of dystopian literature, this might provoke associations with Orwell’s 1984, where the tyrannical Big Brother invented a sterilized language called Newspeak “to narrow the range of thought” until “there will be no thought, as we understand it now.” Tying this back into Wittgenstein, we can say that Big Brother and the Soviets (spoiler: these were one and the same) sought to shrink the worlds of their citizens by shrinking their language. Fiction and history are showing us that our experience of reality is heavily informed by our ability to root the external world in semantic thought. And in case you were beginning to think that this kind of totalitarian behavior was extinct in the modern world, may I remind you that Iraq just outlawed words like homosexuality and gender in order to better terrorize a demographic of their population? But I digress…
Most of us are not faced with the problem of authoritarian regimes amputating sections of our dictionaries and replacing our key terms with ersatz vocabulary, but we are still creatures who produce an historically unprecedented amount of words in a given day. If you are an author or writer (as many people on Substack are), then this consideration is especially pertinent. As Ezra Pound once wrote:
Your language is in the care of your writers. The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
Language care is culture care and a community cannot rise above the quality of its discourse. Pound, being an American déraciné and expat, was particularly sensitive to the qualities of the language being spoken around him. He continues:
Language is the main means of human communication. If an animal’s nervous system does not transmit sensations and stimuli, the animal atrophies. If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
I am going to take some liberty with what Pound calls “literature” and continue to apply his meaning towards language in general. This is important to clarify because I think that authors of great books are no longer the most influential wordsmiths of modern society. If we accumulated and counted all the words of the various emails, tweets, captions, iMessages, Word documents, searches typed into an engine, or comments on a social media site, the average person would probably rack up a higher word count than they realize. Our mere existence in the digital world leaves behind an unavoidable multitude of words, data, and records that we rarely see, but that still exist on some tech company’s servers for foreseeable perpetuity. Yes — people are putting pen to paper less often than they used to, yet we are still drowning in letters, sentences, and text-based information. I say all of this just to amplify the fact that our words are worth thinking about every once and a while. If Wittgenstein’s assertion is correct, then to neglect our language is to risk major degradation in our quality of life.
Language Traps
I am not suggesting that by merely expanding our vocabulary or finding fanciful words to flourish in conversation that we can somehow save democracy. Although, if you have ever listened to classic interviews with some of the great thinkers of the 1900’s, you have likely been faced with the reality of your own impoverished vernacular. It seems intellectually dishonest to say that quality and high-definition discussion on nuanced topics has no correlation to a person’s vocabulary. Big words don’t inherently make for good conversation, but it can definitely help someone become more articulate, which can lead to better communication. I also don’t want to shrug off the benefits of cultivating disciplines that inspire you to pay attention to your words. For example, I have made a personal commitment to be ruthless in asking people what a word means when they use one I am unfamiliar with. My books are also filled with little squares that I put around every term I can’t explain the definition of. All of these get transferred to the back pages of my pocket notebook and are reviewed every time a new word is added. From there, I play a game with myself to see how soon I can use that term in conversation without forcing it too unnaturally. Here are the most recent words in my notebook: adumbrate, ersatz, déraciné. See what I did there?
This type of game is one of several frivolous games I use to pay more attention to my words. Frivolity is a small price to pay when compared to falling into what I call language traps. Language traps are the result of leaving your words unattended to, which is equivalent to leaving your internal world unexamined and allowing your perspectives to be limited. For the remainder of this newsletter, we are going to point out various language traps and why they are so hazardous.
Unique communities develop unique rhetoric. That’s why one of the best ways to examine how language frames our world is to observe the way that people speak when in their subcultures. In fact, the more niche the community, the more intriguing their terminology tends to become. For example, business people speak a particular language, but the more specialized one becomes in marketing, finance, operations, or customer service, the more differentiated your particular acronyms and key words evolve to be. You can easily see the same phenomena in the domains of sports, music, religion, anime, gaming, and so on. This happens naturally, but only because it is so pragmatically beneficial. Narrow-meaning terms help create necessary distinctions between superficially similar things and can be used as a quick way to encapsulate a very contextual idea: ROI vs ROE, Alt Rock vs Indie Rock, weeb vs otaku. Just think of how necessary it is in the medical world to have names that identify a very specific unambiguous set of tools, diagnosis, or processes.
The first language trap we should look out for is wrongfully using niche language to serve as a signal that you are “in the know,” when you really aren’t. I was reminded of this when I watched Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-verse last month. Like everyone else in the theater, I cracked up when Miles’ parents tried to relate to him by speaking in teenage slang. “No-one my age uses those words in that order!” This is a well-worn movie trope, but it’s still funny because it is so terribly relatable. At its core lies the reminder that some words aren’t just universal communications that can be acceptably thrown around anywhere, by anyone, at any time. Words reflect identity. It's our responsibility to earn language, not just learn language.
This concept of earning versus learning language can also be seen in the more high-brow story of Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In this story, the titular character gets lazy and attempts to cast a spell that allows his broom to come alive and clean the room without him. The magic quickly gets away from him and wreaks havoc on the environment. In the Disney version of this tale, the iconic Fantasia hat is the source of the apprentice’s magic. Yet in Goethe’s version, no such hat is mentioned. Rather, Goethe implies that the magic is in the words of the spell.
Every step and saying
That he used, I know,
And with sprites obeying
My arts I will show.
The sorcerer’s apprentice could do the same magic because he knew the enchantment, but he lacked the proper mastery needed to stay in control. It was learned language, but not earned language.
I relate to the sorcerer's apprentice, especially when I think of myself in the earlier days of my career. At the time, my head knowledge of terms, popular practices, abstract notions of correctness, and models for success vastly outweighed my actual experience. I could always seem to spout off just enough buzzwords and catchphrases (KPI’s, customer journey, hedgehog concept, native advertising, yadda yadda…) to get people moving, but found myself completely lost when it came time to make context-specific decisions. Many of us have probably encountered this in other areas of our life. I mean, who hasn’t thrown a fancy term or two on a job resume because they thought it was something the recruiter would want to see? Or perhaps you had the misfortune of dating someone who was fluent in unearned language for romantic relationships. These are the ones who have listened to enough dating podcasts or seen enough Instagram reels to disguise themselves as ideal partners, but ultimately lacked legitimate substance. When we inherit kinds of speech that unlock new doors, we court calamity by stepping into a level of engagement with reality that we were not prepared to encounter. It’s like ending up in a foreign territory without a map. The antidote to unearned language, as soppy as this might sound, is a certain kind of self-honesty. It’s to be sober about the way certain statements taste in your mouth and remain alert to whether or not it feels as though it is authentically coming from you. Admit what you don’t know and admit when your frameworks for life have been fluffed with false knowledge.
However, the thing about language is that it cuts both ways. While unearned and inherited language can open up spaces for you, I suggest that most of us in the modern world experience the opposite problem. Our language actually serves to eliminate curiosity and confine us. I call this sentiment hunting, based off of one more Ezra Pound quote:
Ils cherchent des sentiments pour les accommoder a leur vocabulaire’ —
They hunt for sentiments to fit into their vocabulary.
A popular aphorism instructs us that “to a hammer, everything is a nail.” And it’s true. For a radical conservative, every problem is because of the Dems. For a radical liberal, every problem is because of the GOP. For a poet, everything becomes romanticized and for a technologist, everything becomes a problem to be solved through invention. Yes, there is ideological allegiance at work — but ideology is powerful precisely because it arms the ideologue with explanations. It gives them language to make sense of suffering, challenges, reality, and the future. This can be a wonderful thing at first. It becomes negative when we try to stretch those descriptions to encompass all suffering, all challenges, and all of reality. Explanation starts becoming a substitute for understanding. Sentiment hunting makes it difficult to know whether we are actually seeing the world as it is, or just seeing what we have already decided was there. In this situation, humility and curiosity need to be revived.
Concept Creep
Sentiment hunting is closely related to another language trap — concept creep. Concept creep comes from one of the most intriguing psychological papers released in recent years, where the author Nicholas Haslam explains:
“Just as successful species increase and invade territory, successful concepts and disciplines expand their range into new semantic niches…”
In other words, powerful ideas grow in popularity and are eventually applied towards subjects they were previously unassociated with. A great example of concept creep is explained in Joseph E Davis’ remarkable New Atlantis article “All Pathology, All the Time.” In the article, Davis elucidates how the explanation power of the medical world caused a rapid medicalization of all of society. People were so excited about being able to put a name and process to their ailments, diseases, and suffering, that we started to think about all types of suffering in medical terms — even types of suffering that aren’t rooted in biology. Rather than using language to add dimensions, depth, and nuance to our world, we can easily use it to flatten our experience and perspective of life into one dimensional representations. Davis’ warning shares a lot in common with another favorite article of mine — Katy Waldman’s “The Rise of Therapy-Speak.” She starts by pointing out how therapeutic terms like “gaslight,” “trauma,” “harm,” “toxicity”, and “holding space” have become ubiquitous in modern conversation. She then observes that:
“Therapy seems to have absorbed not just our language but our idea of the good life; its framework of fulfillment and reciprocity, compassion and care, increasingly drives our vision for society.”
And that’s where Wittgenstein re-enters the conversation. Language drives society’s vision of the good life by bounding our cognition within its meanings, explanations, and suggestions. For this reason I have grown more thoughtful of the metaphors I use because metaphors automatically import a number of assumptions into your logic. For instance, with the AGI debate being more popular than ever, I have become chary to use the very common phrases that blur the lines between people and machines. Saying someone is “wired for that” is a convenient way to convey that a person is naturally talented in a certain domain, but it also obscures the very real differences between people and machines. Of course, saying that “someone is naturally talented in a certain domain” is just clunky and, ironically, feels very robotic. I will work on it. Nonetheless, one day we will be grateful to have created clearer categories between what is human and what is not. This extends to organizational life as well. We want our teams “running like a well-oiled machine” and try to “tune” their performance, but is it possible that these phrases contribute to systems where workers feel reduced to impersonal cogs? Again, it is worth thinking about. Metaphors prescribe a way of seeing the world or a given scenario. This can be extremely useful, but only if we remember that every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.
I don’t suggest that we become tyrannical or mystical regarding our use of language - only that we become mindful. Institutions like Disneyland or Apple might enforce codes for rhetoric and nomenclature, but real life works a little differently. We don’t get style guides for speech or manuals for semantics. In fact, when governments, religious communities, political parties, or subcultures start creating one for you, it's a pretty decent sign that you should leave. Instead, humans are tasked with the immense privilege of figuring out for ourselves how to say things. Not only to mean what we say, but to say what we mean. This process is essential for flourishing individuals, since this process is more properly called thinking. And since thinking is hard, it's easy to grow complacent and outsource our language to whatever words are in vogue, even if they are personally unintegrated or merely convenient descriptors that happen to be floating around the stratosphere. My encouragement is to simply taste the words before they come out. To ask — are these words authentically me? Do they convey what I am actually trying to say? Am I taking any shortcuts by deciding to say it this way? If everyone spoke like this, would the world be a better place?
Language care is culture care. Elements of society are certainly atrophying and the solution is, in part, to return to a healthy appreciation for language and thoughtful communication. This is such an extensive topic that I feel raises more questions than offered something insightful, but I hope it was beneficial nonetheless. I would love to continue the conversation by hearing from you in the comments or via email. For more human-centric thoughts on what we pay attention to, make sure to subscribe.
Sincerely,
Bradley Andrews