When words finally fail us, we might have actually found something worthwhile to say.
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When Words Fail
Tag: words
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On Usefully Misunderstanding Words
We prefer ingesting prose that reflexively confirms back to us the identities and systems of belief we perceive ourselves as inhabiting. As a general observation of the mischievously discontinuous arc and trajectory of this plausibly ineradicable narcissism that compels our choices, actions and words – the texts we prefer tend to be slightly off-center and […]
Separation perhaps, but we would be committing a major disservice to knowledge if we were not to acknowledge that both language and thought must derive in some way from deeper principles of self-organisational complexity in (and as) information, energy and logical or material communications systems in nature and physics. Language may be separable from thought […]
The waffling, meandering text more closely associated with stream of consciousness and creative thinking has been slowly bludgeoned into a relatively colourless glue-like soup for corporate, scientific and institutional communication. I mention this because these text-weaving AI tools are now quite rapidly taking the center of generative gravity in regards to the production of such […]
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Recursive Word Games
It is interesting to observe how all of our problems and transient solutions take the form of word games. Beyond the autocatalytic pathologies of self-regulatory perseveration, I think it is worth noting that the game itself is the sole beneficiary of this psychological and organisational recursion. Language itself is quite poorly suited to the complex […]
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Narrative
Narrative is a curious beast and whether or not we assert it as resident or absent in minds, lives, cultures and selves – notice that we only ever invoke and generate more words when we debate a point upon it. I think we do just as well to consider that in as much as human […]
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Unexpected Words
I am quite interested in the ways in which a normative gamification of language (in wordle, crosswords, quizzes, tests and other educational, institutional, political or ideological taxonomies) reflects and reinforces the essentially probabilistic information signal that inflects all linguistic statements, descriptions and assertions of fact with significance. The words, concepts and downstream grammatical or cultural […]
There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]
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Self-ish Resonance
This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]
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The Wrong Words
Have you ever found yourself quite eloquently incapable of cutting through the purely intractable boundaries which condense between concept and utterance? The efferevescing liminalities between the images in your mind and the words with which you speak (and write) them sediment themselves between the structured experience of lived memory and the barren skeletons of orchestrated […]
Understanding that language is essentially quicksilver and almost impossible to control or unambiguously direct for communication and meaning is a difficult realisation to negotiate. A consequence of this problematic ambiguity is that the kinds of language and narratives or systems of belief that percolate to ascendance tend to be quite remedial and simplistic. This inevitably […]
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Time and Impatient Knowing
Being a chronic holist and aspiring raconteur of recursion, I note that the value of the vast and swelling tides of available books, magazines, articles, videos and mixed media montage is a function of the abstract as abbreviation and a (temporal) compression of synopsis as acceleration. This is, of course, a matter of time, of […]
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