"More words do not translate to more meaning, and in fact can eventually devolve into babble."
I've been working on reading some older books from the Western canon of literature, and I am consistently impressed with the density and intricacy of the language older authors used. Beyond just the word choice, there's a follow-through and an attention paid to the meaning of each sentence and how it fits into the whole.
Conversely, a great many modern nonfiction books I've read, from within the past five years, contain a profound incoherence. For instance: John Higgs, in "William Blake vs. the World," somehow manages to argue that Blake agreed with all the concepts of modern materialist science, despite the scathing vitriol Blake expressed, throughout his life, for the entire project of the Enlightenment.
That's the ultimate word sorcery, isn't it? Make it appear to mean the opposite of what it obviously is. Even if they aren't convincing to people who pay the least bit of attention (which, they aren't), it has a radioactive effect of the topic more generally,and convinces bystanders that it's all too "complicated" or "controversial" for them to investigate. Over time, the average opinion becomes something like "meaning is subjective" anyway, regardless of whether that was specifically argued.
I think that's precisely what's going on. Every reference to the Divine, every little indication that we are more than meat robots, must be blotted out.
The Positivists of Vienna were hoping to do this through a completely rationalized, mathematical language. (Fortunately Godel torpedoed the fuckers before they got any momentum.) Their modern counterparts are having to settle for hosing down the culture with intellectual toxic waste.
Our culture is now nothing but broadband jamming, mass noise blared by the government at its citizens in order to blot out any possible signal, so that the proles don't see what's happening to them. From cradle to grave. It's amazing.
I've been enjoying early to mid 20th-century literature (Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Greene, et al) far more than anything current for the very reasons you put forth. There's far more room for the imagination to flourish, more nuance, more based wordsmithing that is the polar opposite of today's gibberish. Having said that, there's Finnegan's Wake. Haha. But that was a ride, man!! You had to just take the ride and let it happen. It was outside intellectual jargon. It was proposterous, which is why it defied criticism. Compared to today's gibberish, I'd take Joyce over any of it.
I should look into it! I’ve enjoyed a lot of the older classics for the wealth and depth of imagination, feelings, exploration of character, society, religion, etc., that is so rarely seen today. Especially in poetry. The amount of time spent reading them is often more than for contemporary stuff and is to be savored.
The evolution of language as it bloats with slang is as fascinating as it is disturbing. I look at the kind of slang that defined my generation in our youth, and it was, for the most part, rather shallow and easy to comprehend. Looking at the youth of today, I see that not only is their jargon and cant much more expansive than what I remember, but it changes with such speed that it's almost difficult to grasp. It's easy to laugh at bullshit like "skibidi toilet" and "rizz" and "gyatt" and the fact that these words cycle out of the zeitgeist almost as fast as they get into it, but I do think it portends a worrying trend. I know people who say, "I have no idea what my six year old is saying", and laugh about it. And, again - I get why. But if this is how fast it's happening now, enabled by short-form, rapid-fire content generators like TikTok and the like, I can easily see a future where we reach a peak where communication between generations is almost impossible without a translator. I could just be worried about nothing, I'll admit, but it's an interesting thought experiment if nothing else.
Michel and Aiden looked at this language-turnover too in their research, and noted that the adoption/obsolescence window is also getting shorter. In fact, their trend analysis, which they dubbed "culturomics" (some special place in Hell for linguists who somehow still suck at naming things) isn't limited to word usage, but extends to proper nouns/names as well. What their work seems to demonstrate is stuff we could've probably intuited (and, in my case, already did)
For example:
"Humanity is forgetting its past faster with each passing year. The Harvard-Google team tracked the frequency with which each year from 1875 to 1975 appeared, finding that references to the past decrease much more rapidly now than in the 19th century. References to “1880” didn’t fall by half until 1912 — a lag of 32 years — but references to “1973” reached half their peak just a decade later, in 1983."
and...
"Modern celebrities are younger and more famous than their 19th century predecessors, but their fame is shorter-lived. Celebrities born in 1950 initially achieved fame at an average age of 29, compared with 43 for celebrities born in 1800. But their fame also disappears faster, with a “half-life” that is increasingly short."
They anaged to sneak the genome buzzword in there too, of course (and if you look at the entities that funded the study, you could easily guess why). But again, these trendlines all "mysteriously" align with the general growth of global telecommunications, and in particular the "Internet" as we've come to know it.
Try reading Chaucer in Old English. I think there's a parallel there but sped up to the point where soon it will be impossible to communicate without a technological intermediary. Maybe that's an end goal.
You made me think that slang is a nascent "secret language" like Yiddish, Pikey. or Jive. If things get oppressive enough, it probably becomes incomprehensible to the outgroup.
On a related note, I listened to this post on the app, and yours is the first time I've heard the newest version of Substack 's AI voice reader, which apparently features emotional inflections for certain words. I listened to a different post earlier today, and it was the same AI voice as it had always been. The fact that I first encountered the new and improved Substack voiceover machine's simulation of human emotion on its reading of this post seems bizarrely significant. If there's an intelligent will behind such coincidences, I very much doubt it originates in our realm -- and certainly not from the machines themselves.
Another potentially weird thing is this: On both the first "Spook" post and this post, the articles initially posted without an author. They are the only two articles I've ever posted where I needed to go back into editing and manually add "Mark Bisone" as the author. I'm just rolling with it, though. Seen much weirder shit than that.
I'm having trouble finding it right now but I read an article detailing the "odd" similarities between sigils and circuit boards. The author was positing on what would happen with a rack of such "sigil" boards. The transhumanism thing gets disturbing when I start pondering the goal of such plans.
Reality has layers. Beings inhabit these layers/dimensions. Some can be pulled into another realm by invocation or applied energy. Helena Blavatsky supposedly had telekinesis which she credited to beings with whom she had contact. Perhaps these stacks will have the ability to allow an interaction. Suddenly we have "artificial intelligence" which can explain the secrets of the universe.
The day I inherited my middle school robotics programmers, I had to correct them on the concept of "hard coding" something. They thought it meant difficult, and had assigned this meaning to the phrase for some time. It took a long time to break them of that one... "oh, RobotC is Hard-code". ....
I still think the idea of 'hard code' is a bit of an oxymoron. If you can do it without a pair of wire strippers and a screwdriver, or a soldergun it ain't 'hard coded'.
I'm not confident I have the intellectual bandwidth to really comment on your complex ideas, but I just read this other essay which seems to address what you've addressed, so I'm going to share it (hope that's okay):
Here's what comes to mind, and convinces me I don't need to get worried by these things:
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
We live in a word-based universe. Satan can only use what already exists, so he will twist the word and deceive many. The essay I linked mentions Manichaeism, and who was a great Manichaean before he supposedly converted to Christianity? Augustine, beloved of what I call Big Church. Both Catholicism and magisterial Protestantism claim him as a father. Interestingly Manichaeism has Lucifer playing God's role and Ahriman playing Satan's role. What a twisting of reality! And when you encode that into the digital net...? Such genius. But doomed to fail. Unfortunately many souls will be lost along the way, but that's the devil's real goal anyway. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. That's it. The Bible is an actual living book, something the digital world can only accomplish by zombifying people, like a parasitized bug. Reading the living word of God is protection (literal) against the hypnosis of the screen/chip/whatever. Read it every day, first asking God to guide you, and you will gain the distance necessary to understand what is actually happening. Does any of that make sense?
Thank you for discussing this. Today alone I saw two lives on TikTok. The first one was all about how the Bible was written only to people alive at the time. That it has no relevance today because Jesus has removed sin from the world so we only need to follow God directly through our heart. I think they were calling this post-modern Christianity. The second live was how Jesus as understood commonly today is actually deceptive and negative. I didn’t stay long enough to hear what they were calling that. But in both cases, simply reading the Word seeking God’s Truth was thereby discredited from their default position. In both cases, Jesus’ divinity was also portrayed either neutrally or discredited to a degree.
What struck me the most was not only the (seeming) increase in my feed of negative viewpoints of traditional Christianity, but also the fact that there was much of anything positive for today’s religious listeners to be gleaned from the Bible or Jesus in particular.
Indeed the Bible is a Living Word to me, and the fact that there are apparently more strong proponents of a post-Christian Christianity than I suspected will lead to interesting places in the future and I fear will lead to more obfuscation, lack of clarity, and less truth overall.
Maureen, I'm so sorry to not have returned an acknowledgement of your response to my own comment! I haven't been getting notifications by substack when anyone engages with me, so I need to rootle around in settings and see what the problem is. I agree that things are getting very strange in the Christianity sphere. So many people who used to know where they stood concerning the Bible as the living Word of God, and how it informs our benchmarks on good vs. evil seem to have gone...... squishy? Porous? Lobotomized? It's a dangerous time.
Have you read Turing’s biography? He didn’t think our brains were the cause of consciousness, but rather more like antennas that picked it up from somewhere else.
No. I am well aware of the transmussion theory of consciousness, and I have my own unresolved thoughts about it. But I wouldn't care to read Turing's version.
Like I said: I was required to pore through reams and reams of his experimental work. "By his fruits" I already know him, all too well. He treats consciousness as a confidence game, in which the goal of play is to convince others that you are "real," even when his side of the blinds knows it's a scam. Pseudocientific taqiyya, essentially.
It's not all that different from his spy work, really, or from the double life he led in private. Trusting that he actually believed anything he wrote or said would be like the frog trusting the scorpion.
Mark, in regards to words and their interpretations, misinterpretations, disinformation, propaganda, and/or deception, consider the exploding growth of the use of emojis and the fact that many people would rather text than call or speak directly to others. This world of hieroglyphics and texting is ripe for misinterpretation without any context or emotional visual feedback, intentional or not. While 21st Century communications can reflect the highest standards of mankind's achievement, there is also a dark side and undercurrent in language and the human psyche, that runs deep like the root system of a tree, potentially greater than the tree itself... Mark
Agree 100%. I'd even go further, and suggest that the devolution of language into less legible, more subjectively interpretative formats constitutes an attack on meaning itself.
The process of communicating 'meaning' through the use of language is further degraded through today's poor spelling and grammar, along with an almost, at times, nonexistent understanding of history and societal context, as demonstrated today in the realm of politics, economics, 'climate science', etc., devolving into a cesspool of untruths and gibberish...
And just... shameless inanity. I don't hold myself up as some kind of great communicator, but I can recall a time when even people saying very stupid things in public at least had a silver-plated tongue installed. They were glib, but not entirely without self-awareness. Now what they say in public all has a distinct zombie or cartoon feel.
And it is all taken very seriously. Which reminds me of something else. I wanted to ask if you have written anything on the decline of interest in cursive writing and the impact that will make on studying primary historical source documents? Or if there is anything you’d recommend reading? Thank you!
This is a great question. I haven't written (typed!) about it, but it's been a topic of hot discussion in our household. Maybe I should try to give some of my own thoughts on it. It seems like one of those low-key demolitions that we aren't supposed to notice. Thanks for pointing this out.
Yes. Thank you so much for this; looking forward to it. I notice it maybe a bit more than others because my parents used to have me practice penmanship during my elementary school summers. They both had the lovely writing to show for it and I got to use their old school books for it, lol. Could use some more practice today, certainly, lolol.
Lewis Lapham wrote similarly in his monthly column around May, 1994. It obviously made an impression, as I can tell you where (the kitchen of my studio apartment in Rogers Park, Chicago) & when I read it (late spring light, on a Saturday morning).
I also washed glasses that morning in water so hot that I nearly scalded myself in doing so. They came out sparkling clean, with a squeak because something, somehow, caught your fingers when you ran them around the outside of the glass. so there is that, too.
"The same can be said of devising ever more complex words and concepts. Each time we add complexity to any system, we pay for it with added fragility."
Have you ever read A Topiary, by Shane Carruth? Unproduced screenplay, if you've seen and liked Primer or Upstream Color it has a similar vibe. DM me an email address and I can send it, or you can probably still find it by googling. It fits in well with this essay
This is why I tend to keep my language rather simple, so that I can be understood and not mistaken. A few think that means I'm not that smart, but I don't need their validation and I'm plenty capable of seeing through their high falutin gibberish. Keeping ones language simple while remaining a student of language also helps to translate the noise.
Nice thoughts. I think it was The Everlasting Man where Chesterton said that the secret to the modern world is to put the long words first. e.g. A phrase like, 'the evolution of the idea of God' is perfectly modern and fits in very nicely with the world, but if we put the short word first, 'the God of the idea of evolution' you very quickly find yourself in territory both more meaningful and more dangerous.
I remember in the Great Financial Crisis(Bush era, shall we call that the Mk. 1?) much of the blame was cast on 'derivatives', that is financial products which are a combination of other products, for example, a group of bad mortgages put together with one or two good mortgages were somehow thought to make a single mediocre product and thus make bad mortgages salable and buyable. All of the increases in our language are increases in derivative language. The actual number of referents, things to speak about, have not increased. Neither have the number of ideas about these referents.(I want to look at the number of ideas mathematically to be clear for a moment. I don't just mean that the increase in language isn't propelled by a lot of new discoveries, but that for example if in say 1980 we had 6 billion people with an average of 10 ideas a piece in their heads, if we now have 8 billion people they only have say 6 or 7 ideas in their heads on average leading for a total decrease in the number of ideas.) This would obviously lead to a corresponding decrease in what we may call 'primary speech' that is speech which directly refers to something that exists, whether physically or notionally. Then the increase is in 'secondary speech' or speech about 'derivatives', abstractions, combinations of real things into chimeras that nowhere exist.
“Everything that you have ever heard or seen is fake! An illusion crafted by me and those like me. So what is real western man, what can you rely on when the very ground beneath your feet turns to sand?”
“My fists”
Now, with that out of the way allow me to explain something i’ve noticed over the years that is tangential to your own essays. When the cloud people go about banning words due to the isms, the underlying meanings don’t suddenly go poof. Instead they slither out and latch onto a new word. Take “Youths” for example, it used to just mean “young people”, but now in its proper context it means “those of criminally inclined heritage”. Its interesting to witness and i’ve seen it happen over and over again. The underlying concepts can’t be slain so easily and will just latch onto whatever word they can. There have been more and more unintentional side effects to their black magic (as is always the case with black magic) and it’s beginning to rapidly accumulate now. Add the added speed of things due to the internet and the amount of chaos in the world is going to hit levels never seen before in the “modern” era.
For non-nerds - the concepts words relay exist separately from the words. The destruction of language doesn’t destroy the concepts, if they’re patently obvious.
"More words do not translate to more meaning, and in fact can eventually devolve into babble."
I've been working on reading some older books from the Western canon of literature, and I am consistently impressed with the density and intricacy of the language older authors used. Beyond just the word choice, there's a follow-through and an attention paid to the meaning of each sentence and how it fits into the whole.
Conversely, a great many modern nonfiction books I've read, from within the past five years, contain a profound incoherence. For instance: John Higgs, in "William Blake vs. the World," somehow manages to argue that Blake agreed with all the concepts of modern materialist science, despite the scathing vitriol Blake expressed, throughout his life, for the entire project of the Enlightenment.
That's the ultimate word sorcery, isn't it? Make it appear to mean the opposite of what it obviously is. Even if they aren't convincing to people who pay the least bit of attention (which, they aren't), it has a radioactive effect of the topic more generally,and convinces bystanders that it's all too "complicated" or "controversial" for them to investigate. Over time, the average opinion becomes something like "meaning is subjective" anyway, regardless of whether that was specifically argued.
I think that's precisely what's going on. Every reference to the Divine, every little indication that we are more than meat robots, must be blotted out.
The Positivists of Vienna were hoping to do this through a completely rationalized, mathematical language. (Fortunately Godel torpedoed the fuckers before they got any momentum.) Their modern counterparts are having to settle for hosing down the culture with intellectual toxic waste.
Our culture is now nothing but broadband jamming, mass noise blared by the government at its citizens in order to blot out any possible signal, so that the proles don't see what's happening to them. From cradle to grave. It's amazing.
1000%
I've been enjoying early to mid 20th-century literature (Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Greene, et al) far more than anything current for the very reasons you put forth. There's far more room for the imagination to flourish, more nuance, more based wordsmithing that is the polar opposite of today's gibberish. Having said that, there's Finnegan's Wake. Haha. But that was a ride, man!! You had to just take the ride and let it happen. It was outside intellectual jargon. It was proposterous, which is why it defied criticism. Compared to today's gibberish, I'd take Joyce over any of it.
I should look into it! I’ve enjoyed a lot of the older classics for the wealth and depth of imagination, feelings, exploration of character, society, religion, etc., that is so rarely seen today. Especially in poetry. The amount of time spent reading them is often more than for contemporary stuff and is to be savored.
The evolution of language as it bloats with slang is as fascinating as it is disturbing. I look at the kind of slang that defined my generation in our youth, and it was, for the most part, rather shallow and easy to comprehend. Looking at the youth of today, I see that not only is their jargon and cant much more expansive than what I remember, but it changes with such speed that it's almost difficult to grasp. It's easy to laugh at bullshit like "skibidi toilet" and "rizz" and "gyatt" and the fact that these words cycle out of the zeitgeist almost as fast as they get into it, but I do think it portends a worrying trend. I know people who say, "I have no idea what my six year old is saying", and laugh about it. And, again - I get why. But if this is how fast it's happening now, enabled by short-form, rapid-fire content generators like TikTok and the like, I can easily see a future where we reach a peak where communication between generations is almost impossible without a translator. I could just be worried about nothing, I'll admit, but it's an interesting thought experiment if nothing else.
Michel and Aiden looked at this language-turnover too in their research, and noted that the adoption/obsolescence window is also getting shorter. In fact, their trend analysis, which they dubbed "culturomics" (some special place in Hell for linguists who somehow still suck at naming things) isn't limited to word usage, but extends to proper nouns/names as well. What their work seems to demonstrate is stuff we could've probably intuited (and, in my case, already did)
For example:
"Humanity is forgetting its past faster with each passing year. The Harvard-Google team tracked the frequency with which each year from 1875 to 1975 appeared, finding that references to the past decrease much more rapidly now than in the 19th century. References to “1880” didn’t fall by half until 1912 — a lag of 32 years — but references to “1973” reached half their peak just a decade later, in 1983."
and...
"Modern celebrities are younger and more famous than their 19th century predecessors, but their fame is shorter-lived. Celebrities born in 1950 initially achieved fame at an average age of 29, compared with 43 for celebrities born in 1800. But their fame also disappears faster, with a “half-life” that is increasingly short."
(from a Harvard Gazette article, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/cultural-genome/)
They anaged to sneak the genome buzzword in there too, of course (and if you look at the entities that funded the study, you could easily guess why). But again, these trendlines all "mysteriously" align with the general growth of global telecommunications, and in particular the "Internet" as we've come to know it.
This is also where my mind went and it is horrifying. The internet has sped things up so much that the average person can no longer keep up with it.
Try reading Chaucer in Old English. I think there's a parallel there but sped up to the point where soon it will be impossible to communicate without a technological intermediary. Maybe that's an end goal.
Yes, seems like a feature, not a bug, to me.
bet
You made me think that slang is a nascent "secret language" like Yiddish, Pikey. or Jive. If things get oppressive enough, it probably becomes incomprehensible to the outgroup.
On a related note, I listened to this post on the app, and yours is the first time I've heard the newest version of Substack 's AI voice reader, which apparently features emotional inflections for certain words. I listened to a different post earlier today, and it was the same AI voice as it had always been. The fact that I first encountered the new and improved Substack voiceover machine's simulation of human emotion on its reading of this post seems bizarrely significant. If there's an intelligent will behind such coincidences, I very much doubt it originates in our realm -- and certainly not from the machines themselves.
Another potentially weird thing is this: On both the first "Spook" post and this post, the articles initially posted without an author. They are the only two articles I've ever posted where I needed to go back into editing and manually add "Mark Bisone" as the author. I'm just rolling with it, though. Seen much weirder shit than that.
I'm having trouble finding it right now but I read an article detailing the "odd" similarities between sigils and circuit boards. The author was positing on what would happen with a rack of such "sigil" boards. The transhumanism thing gets disturbing when I start pondering the goal of such plans.
There’s a lot there to ponder; those comparisons are quite interesting.
Reality has layers. Beings inhabit these layers/dimensions. Some can be pulled into another realm by invocation or applied energy. Helena Blavatsky supposedly had telekinesis which she credited to beings with whom she had contact. Perhaps these stacks will have the ability to allow an interaction. Suddenly we have "artificial intelligence" which can explain the secrets of the universe.
I thought I’ve read that they can’t completely explain how AI works, either.
The day I inherited my middle school robotics programmers, I had to correct them on the concept of "hard coding" something. They thought it meant difficult, and had assigned this meaning to the phrase for some time. It took a long time to break them of that one... "oh, RobotC is Hard-code". ....
That's pretty funny! HARD CODE == COBOL!
(Although, more appropriatey, shredded, slimy spaghetti code, of the kind that's HARD to keep from sliding off the fork)
Would that be cobolara instead of carbonara?
I remember when my dad had to learn c back in the day, lolol.
LOL, but was it HARD C?!
Not sure, but he also yelled about c++, lol. Told him that’s why he was getting the big money, lolol.
I still think the idea of 'hard code' is a bit of an oxymoron. If you can do it without a pair of wire strippers and a screwdriver, or a soldergun it ain't 'hard coded'.
I'm not confident I have the intellectual bandwidth to really comment on your complex ideas, but I just read this other essay which seems to address what you've addressed, so I'm going to share it (hope that's okay):
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/08/30/web-of-lies-demonising-the-internet-quite-literally/
Here's what comes to mind, and convinces me I don't need to get worried by these things:
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
We live in a word-based universe. Satan can only use what already exists, so he will twist the word and deceive many. The essay I linked mentions Manichaeism, and who was a great Manichaean before he supposedly converted to Christianity? Augustine, beloved of what I call Big Church. Both Catholicism and magisterial Protestantism claim him as a father. Interestingly Manichaeism has Lucifer playing God's role and Ahriman playing Satan's role. What a twisting of reality! And when you encode that into the digital net...? Such genius. But doomed to fail. Unfortunately many souls will be lost along the way, but that's the devil's real goal anyway. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. That's it. The Bible is an actual living book, something the digital world can only accomplish by zombifying people, like a parasitized bug. Reading the living word of God is protection (literal) against the hypnosis of the screen/chip/whatever. Read it every day, first asking God to guide you, and you will gain the distance necessary to understand what is actually happening. Does any of that make sense?
Thank you for discussing this. Today alone I saw two lives on TikTok. The first one was all about how the Bible was written only to people alive at the time. That it has no relevance today because Jesus has removed sin from the world so we only need to follow God directly through our heart. I think they were calling this post-modern Christianity. The second live was how Jesus as understood commonly today is actually deceptive and negative. I didn’t stay long enough to hear what they were calling that. But in both cases, simply reading the Word seeking God’s Truth was thereby discredited from their default position. In both cases, Jesus’ divinity was also portrayed either neutrally or discredited to a degree.
What struck me the most was not only the (seeming) increase in my feed of negative viewpoints of traditional Christianity, but also the fact that there was much of anything positive for today’s religious listeners to be gleaned from the Bible or Jesus in particular.
Indeed the Bible is a Living Word to me, and the fact that there are apparently more strong proponents of a post-Christian Christianity than I suspected will lead to interesting places in the future and I fear will lead to more obfuscation, lack of clarity, and less truth overall.
Thank you for your thoughtful post!
Maureen, I'm so sorry to not have returned an acknowledgement of your response to my own comment! I haven't been getting notifications by substack when anyone engages with me, so I need to rootle around in settings and see what the problem is. I agree that things are getting very strange in the Christianity sphere. So many people who used to know where they stood concerning the Bible as the living Word of God, and how it informs our benchmarks on good vs. evil seem to have gone...... squishy? Porous? Lobotomized? It's a dangerous time.
Have you read Turing’s biography? He didn’t think our brains were the cause of consciousness, but rather more like antennas that picked it up from somewhere else.
No. I am well aware of the transmussion theory of consciousness, and I have my own unresolved thoughts about it. But I wouldn't care to read Turing's version.
Like I said: I was required to pore through reams and reams of his experimental work. "By his fruits" I already know him, all too well. He treats consciousness as a confidence game, in which the goal of play is to convince others that you are "real," even when his side of the blinds knows it's a scam. Pseudocientific taqiyya, essentially.
It's not all that different from his spy work, really, or from the double life he led in private. Trusting that he actually believed anything he wrote or said would be like the frog trusting the scorpion.
Mark, in regards to words and their interpretations, misinterpretations, disinformation, propaganda, and/or deception, consider the exploding growth of the use of emojis and the fact that many people would rather text than call or speak directly to others. This world of hieroglyphics and texting is ripe for misinterpretation without any context or emotional visual feedback, intentional or not. While 21st Century communications can reflect the highest standards of mankind's achievement, there is also a dark side and undercurrent in language and the human psyche, that runs deep like the root system of a tree, potentially greater than the tree itself... Mark
Agree 100%. I'd even go further, and suggest that the devolution of language into less legible, more subjectively interpretative formats constitutes an attack on meaning itself.
The process of communicating 'meaning' through the use of language is further degraded through today's poor spelling and grammar, along with an almost, at times, nonexistent understanding of history and societal context, as demonstrated today in the realm of politics, economics, 'climate science', etc., devolving into a cesspool of untruths and gibberish...
And just... shameless inanity. I don't hold myself up as some kind of great communicator, but I can recall a time when even people saying very stupid things in public at least had a silver-plated tongue installed. They were glib, but not entirely without self-awareness. Now what they say in public all has a distinct zombie or cartoon feel.
And it is all taken very seriously. Which reminds me of something else. I wanted to ask if you have written anything on the decline of interest in cursive writing and the impact that will make on studying primary historical source documents? Or if there is anything you’d recommend reading? Thank you!
This is a great question. I haven't written (typed!) about it, but it's been a topic of hot discussion in our household. Maybe I should try to give some of my own thoughts on it. It seems like one of those low-key demolitions that we aren't supposed to notice. Thanks for pointing this out.
Yes. Thank you so much for this; looking forward to it. I notice it maybe a bit more than others because my parents used to have me practice penmanship during my elementary school summers. They both had the lovely writing to show for it and I got to use their old school books for it, lol. Could use some more practice today, certainly, lolol.
Why, next you'll suggest that this is all part of an attack on the Logos Himself.
Lewis Lapham wrote similarly in his monthly column around May, 1994. It obviously made an impression, as I can tell you where (the kitchen of my studio apartment in Rogers Park, Chicago) & when I read it (late spring light, on a Saturday morning).
I also washed glasses that morning in water so hot that I nearly scalded myself in doing so. They came out sparkling clean, with a squeak because something, somehow, caught your fingers when you ran them around the outside of the glass. so there is that, too.
"The same can be said of devising ever more complex words and concepts. Each time we add complexity to any system, we pay for it with added fragility."
Such as 6GW?
To be fair, I didn't make that. I just added +1.
I missed you, Mark.
Pascal could not explain that, nor a machine. 14 letters, two punctuation marks, and three spaces. It's exactly like you were saying about, "dog."
What's funny us that various conversation modules I've worked with might parse it as "I have missed THE mark." Or, in other words, "I have sinned."
That is hilarious.
Someone writing on monk life said that the animal best symbolizing the monk is the night owl.
Its eyes' size is such that they are the "center" of its body; observing the center of its being.
And it observes by night, when "things finally appear as they are" (provided one is willing to wait for the night to observe, and see their reality).
Have you ever read A Topiary, by Shane Carruth? Unproduced screenplay, if you've seen and liked Primer or Upstream Color it has a similar vibe. DM me an email address and I can send it, or you can probably still find it by googling. It fits in well with this essay
I was a fan of Primer, and also wondered what Carruth did after that (I have a vague memory of seeing Upstream Color, but I might be mistaken).
I just read a synopsis, and it sounds wild. He was/is definitely one of those artists wearing the 6G night vision goggles.
This is why I tend to keep my language rather simple, so that I can be understood and not mistaken. A few think that means I'm not that smart, but I don't need their validation and I'm plenty capable of seeing through their high falutin gibberish. Keeping ones language simple while remaining a student of language also helps to translate the noise.
Nice thoughts. I think it was The Everlasting Man where Chesterton said that the secret to the modern world is to put the long words first. e.g. A phrase like, 'the evolution of the idea of God' is perfectly modern and fits in very nicely with the world, but if we put the short word first, 'the God of the idea of evolution' you very quickly find yourself in territory both more meaningful and more dangerous.
I remember in the Great Financial Crisis(Bush era, shall we call that the Mk. 1?) much of the blame was cast on 'derivatives', that is financial products which are a combination of other products, for example, a group of bad mortgages put together with one or two good mortgages were somehow thought to make a single mediocre product and thus make bad mortgages salable and buyable. All of the increases in our language are increases in derivative language. The actual number of referents, things to speak about, have not increased. Neither have the number of ideas about these referents.(I want to look at the number of ideas mathematically to be clear for a moment. I don't just mean that the increase in language isn't propelled by a lot of new discoveries, but that for example if in say 1980 we had 6 billion people with an average of 10 ideas a piece in their heads, if we now have 8 billion people they only have say 6 or 7 ideas in their heads on average leading for a total decrease in the number of ideas.) This would obviously lead to a corresponding decrease in what we may call 'primary speech' that is speech which directly refers to something that exists, whether physically or notionally. Then the increase is in 'secondary speech' or speech about 'derivatives', abstractions, combinations of real things into chimeras that nowhere exist.
It does rather make the truth harder to find and discuss.
“Everything that you have ever heard or seen is fake! An illusion crafted by me and those like me. So what is real western man, what can you rely on when the very ground beneath your feet turns to sand?”
“My fists”
Now, with that out of the way allow me to explain something i’ve noticed over the years that is tangential to your own essays. When the cloud people go about banning words due to the isms, the underlying meanings don’t suddenly go poof. Instead they slither out and latch onto a new word. Take “Youths” for example, it used to just mean “young people”, but now in its proper context it means “those of criminally inclined heritage”. Its interesting to witness and i’ve seen it happen over and over again. The underlying concepts can’t be slain so easily and will just latch onto whatever word they can. There have been more and more unintentional side effects to their black magic (as is always the case with black magic) and it’s beginning to rapidly accumulate now. Add the added speed of things due to the internet and the amount of chaos in the world is going to hit levels never seen before in the “modern” era.
For non-nerds - the concepts words relay exist separately from the words. The destruction of language doesn’t destroy the concepts, if they’re patently obvious.
Proverbs 10:19 (CSB) When there are many words, sin is unavoidable, but the one who controls his lips is prudent.
"To be continued"
Brutal....great article.