Language

Language is, broadly, a set of base symbols that create meaning when assembled together. Speaking uses mouth sounds, while writing uses characters. Math itself is a highly logical language.

We use language when we’re trying to communicate ideas. While we often think of speaking and writing as language, body expressions are often language as well.

Ideas

Language itself represents the pinnacle of understanding. If we can frame ideas in words, we have the fullest capacity to understand them. To take the understanding even farther, we must use simpler words.

Each sound represents a syllable (e.g., “ah”, “em”), and a combination of syllables creates a “word”, which represents a complete idea. Vowel sounds link a word together (e.g., a, e, i), and consonants provide more of the story about how the word makes us feel (e.g., the nonsense word “ah-no-ma-ha” feels far less threatening than “ch-ak’tchnapth”).

Every letter, word, and phrase is a symbol that represents an idea of its own as a relationship to other ideas. Each idea comes with its own image and feelings.

In languages like English, each character has an abstract meaning that only forms ideas when they’re assembled into words. In other languages (e.g., Eastern languages like Chinese), the letter itself has a clearer meaning.

Written and spoken language are not the same language, and run parallel to one another in any culture. They’re connected with each other, though, meaning we tend to treat them as one singular codex.

The ideas of a word are not simple. Each and every word often contains dozens of associations that form into a story. These stories include ideas, feelings, many implications, and even more of the same from other words’ relationship to those ideas.

We must delicately balance between precision and brevity, and our choice of language is usually elaborate enough to capture the spectrum. If too precise, the listener will get bored. If too brief, the listener will be confused. In that sense, the communicator only meets that balance by understanding the purposes of their audience.

This complexity means we often have similar words for nearly the same idea to convey different feelings and values. Further, body language, timing, visual cues, and context will emphasize or diminish parts of those ideas.

Format

All ideas start with nouns. Nouns state something as a concrete value. They usually represent metaphysical reality, but can also be hypothetical, but are essentially “pointing” at something.

Verbs are values of action, and are always connected to a noun (even when the noun is simply implied) and help us understand what purpose to assign those nouns.

While nouns are relatively static, verbs come in many forms including time (e.g., “was”, “will be”), details (e.g., “ran” vs. “dashed”), and framing (e.g., “escaped” vs. “infiltrated”).

Nouns and verbs are the basis of all things. Without the noun, there is nothing to identify or understand, but a noun without a verb is meaningless. We often “verb-ize” nouns for the sake of creating meaning, and almost any noun can be colloquially converted into a verb.

Adjectives and adverbs elaborate nouns and verbs. By using many descriptors, we can modify ideas as far as we want. Adjectives and adverbs increase specificity. Frequently, they adapt the feelings their parent nouns and verbs had incited, and often come with their own associated feelings.

We connect words to similar and opposing ideas to create synonyms and antonyms. Mere awareness of related words can create understanding, but can also distort perceptions.

Conjunctions allow compounded ideas and elaborate expressions. They are often the mechanism for half-truths (e.g., “talked to him” versus “talked about him”). Since they’re so small, we tend to casually express them in daily language without much thought, but they define the details of most rules (especially in legal domains).

By drawing from feelings, our choice of words will form symbolic comparisons, which crafts a sensation with words. Decent-quality writing combines those words together (which represent ideas individually) to create unique idea combinations that we call “sentences”.

Because speaking or writing has an implied purpose for its existence, language always presumes an audience exists as well.

Adaptation

Until we reach adulthood, every letter and word is passed on to us from our culture and imbued with implications. When we get older, we predominantly use logic to understand secondary languages (including writing) instead of intuition.

We use modifier words to streamline everything, and most of them are simple improvisations:

  • Onomatopoeia are written words we use to describe audible sounds (e.g., “bang, pow”).
  • We use pronouns instead of proper nouns to take away emphasis or speed up conversations.
  • We’ll often make contractions to efficiently use less letters and syllables.
  • Prefixes and suffixes are useful to easily assert a relationship with something else (e.g., antidisestablishmentarianism is anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism).
  • We’ll sometimes use nouns as verbs to sound more official (e.g., monetize instead of “get something to money”).
  • We make words that create sweeping generalizations for people groups, both as demonyms for regions (e.g., “Germans”) and ethnonyms for identity (e.g., “Catholics”).
  • We’ll condense the idea to a simple feeling in the form of slang when we frequently express an idea but don’t have a suitable word (e.g, “paper-pusher” instead of “bureaucrat” or “office worker”).
  • We’ll remove precise modifiers if we use a word frequently enough, since they’re already implied (e.g., “power” instead of “electrical power”)

Language is constantly moving. While there’s a “codified” standard in things like dictionaries and textbooks, language shifts with society’s trends:

  • Meanings of words will be repurposed, then used dominantly for that new purpose (e.g., “gay” was a feeling but is now a sexual orientation).
  • Feelings that the word evoked redirect themselves to specific things (e.g., “technology” is now localized to specifically high-technology).
  • Figures of speech become outdated with technological development or new trends (e.g., “pop in the movie”, “dial up someone’s phone”).
  • Political efforts (especially with leftism) redirect thoughts to associate or disassociate for the sake of personal gain.

This isn’t confined to spoken language, and can apply to body language or timing as well.

New Words

Niches and specializations will create their own jargon, for several reasons:

  • Niche groups talk about a lot about specific ideas, so members will form a word or acronym around that idea to avoid saying a phrase every time. This saves tons of time for their purposes.
  • Many specific things are similar to other things, so trade speak lets everyone demarcate them without lots of adjectives.
  • As a side benefit, a person’s knowledge of that jargon indicates their standing in that group, with more jargon implying more allegiance to the group’s collective purposes.

These specific words don’t translate well across industries. For example, “depreciation” has at least three distinct meanings: accounting depreciation decreases the value of an asset over its expected life, economics depreciation means something drops in market value, and legal depreciation is when something deteriorates to uselessness.

Ordering

The order of words matters heavily. Our minds are story-based, so the passive voice can rearrange the noun’s location and remove/add emphasis to the verb before the noun:

  • “The assailant hid the body, then dug a grave for it and threw it in.”
  • “The body was hidden until a grave was dug, then the assailant threw it in.”

Along with the voice, adding or removing words to a sentence can make a statement vague or authoritative:

  • “I don’t mean to be so certain of what I’m saying here, but, if you could, I think it’d be a good idea for you to stop playing and start working.”
  • “Stop playing and get to work.”

The order and number of words can very frequently demonstrate the true purpose of why people say something.

Sticky

A word never exists in a vacuum, and it tends to “stick” to nearby words and evoke different degrees of feeling based on its relationship to other words. By adding more words and swapping out nouns for pronouns, we can dramatically change a sentence’s story:

  • One sentence…
    • “At a party, John was near a philanderer.”
  • …is far more condemning than…
    • “John, at a party, was nearby someone who was regarded as a philanderer.”
  • …which is yet far more condemning than…
    • “You know John, right? Well, anyway, something you may know already. He was nearby someone at a party who was regarded as a philanderer.”
  • …and can be completely redirected
    • There’s a philanderer, whom anyone with an ounce of human decency should despise, a person of distinctively bad taste. At a party, John was unfortunate enough to be nearby them.

Most people automatically sift through this with other people, so nobody tends to realize how frequently people “stick” things near other things.

Also, ideas tend to persist even when authority figures change out words. Revising language (e.g., leftism) only stalls everyone’s identification of the idea until the word associates to the old emphasis of that word:

  • At various times in the USA the words “colored person”, “black”, “Negro”, and “African American” have been used, but they all allude to the exact same identifier.
  • Homosexuals adopted the word “gay”, which removed its old association with joyfulness and became slang until it was replaced with the catchall “LGBT” and later “LGBTQQIDAAPPO2SBNBGNCGGAPPO+”, which all allude to the same broad identifier.

After enough overuse and time, words will form into habit for people. At that point, the words become placeholders for other things:

  • Nobody thinks of “Saint Anthony” if they visit San Antonio, TX or that “New York” is a colonial connection to “York”.
  • Most people aren’t aware a laser is “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”.

Connection

Language doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The words we use are “building blocks” for the world around us. It’s why we self-dialogue, even from an early age.

Further, we tend to use language to convey concepts on “levels” of depth:

  1. Cliché conversation – generic “filler” information as part of a shared ritual with others.
  2. Trivia – useless facts about ourselves and our environment.
  3. Ideas/Judgments – the framework of how we perceive the world around us.
  4. Feelings – the basis for how we approach what we know, and subsequently the methodology for our ideas/judgments.
  5. Authenticity – complete emotional openness and honesty with others and ourselves, which requires an absence of fear.

The power of language doesn’t stop there. Language becomes the means on how we combat and clarify the unknown, so spoken/written statements dramatically increase the chances of us making decisions in to that end.

Language generally states reality itself (“constantive”), which means it can be proven or disproven. However, in some situations our language can be the results that define the consequences in reality (“performative”). For example, a minister saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife” is performative, while the statement “You are husband and wife” in almost any context is simply constantive.

Misuse

Most people misuse language, either from inexperience or with purposes to gain power.

The most frequent misuse of language comes through barriers in shared understanding. A variety of reasons will mean we don’t get the message across correctly, and the other person concludes the wrong thing. Miscommunication is a major cause of human conflict, and differing languages are the strongest aspect of it.

When people abuse language, they are often either using a word with a stronger feeling than they have as an emotional bludgeon, or mincing specific words to imply a more subdued belief than they really have.


Application

Words contain many ideas, so our choice of words has a profound impact on how we see our environment. For that reason, it’s better to choose carefully, and aim for a simpler word that evokes more accurate feelings (and therefore easier to fix errors) whenever uncertain.

If a specific idea doesn’t have a word, we tend to not think about it. If we run across one, we should make a new word to more thoroughly understand it, and the easiest way is to convert a noun into a verb or use the same idea from a different domain.

Words’ emotions make us associate them to action:

  • Using elderly words makes people walk slower.
  • People speak faster with short words.
  • People access trivia better when thinking of college professors.
  • Discussing sports makes people dumber.

We tend to link words without meaning to similar words with meaning. People named Dennis or Denise are more likely to become dentists, people named Mary are more likely to get married, societies that have many words for “love” have many more ways to express it.

Communication is a huge part of the human experience and how we understand, so our word choice directly defines many aspects of our existence. Because of this, people can easily abuse words, and the beginning to living well comes in speaking its existence correctly.

Time travel stories are exceedingly difficult because they mess with our fixed perspective of time. A time travel story means “What I’m doing right now will be before what I had done, which comes after what I will do next” can be a syntactically correct statement in the story’s world.

At its farthest use, words carry legal power. In those cases, the difference between small words like “of” and “for” can change the entire purpose of a document or statement.

The breadth and range of descriptors like adjectives and adverbs gives us the unlimited ability to express ideas. But, words can weigh down a sentence. Descriptors can be poetry applied to writing, but often sabotages everyday language.

The only way we can create a language-perfect AI is to have one that can accurately recognize its audience, not simply restate information relative to previous statements.

Synonyms and antonyms are useful, but they’re also risky if we over-simplify the concepts. “Part” is the antonym of “whole”, but also of “non-part”, and “whole” and “non-part” are completely unrelated ideas.

Most language starts simple, but we tend to make words complicated as we add to them. There’s value in contractions and pronouns, but elegant language keeps prefixes and suffixes to a relative minimum and avoids turning nouns into verbs whenever possible. Awful writers, on the other hand, destroy any meaning they were attempting to convey.

When we use slang or add lots of prefixes and suffixes to something, we don’t really understand it very thoroughly.

Words are constantly mutating and shifting, so we must mind which words we use with which groups.

The purposes we aim for determines which parts of our understanding we’ll choose to omit when communicating, which reflects itself broadly in the DISC communication style:

By changing words, leaders can conceal truth, at least for a time. They typically remove emphasis of that word over time than legitimately change anything with the redefinition.

Words change how we think, so we must be careful what we believe from others and constantly reconsider how we once saw things when we first used a specific word.

Communicating images and videos is useful, but words we can quickly write and unpack in others’ imagination will always be a key component of how we use technology.

When we use our language to make excuses (e.g, “I can’t do X because Y”, “X caused me to Y”), we give power to others outside ourselves. Over time, we can often identify with that helplessness and destroy any chance at living well.