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Bertrand Russell and George Orwell both had riffs on this: if you're precise about what you mean, and choose your words carefully, you end up improving language just by speaking and writing. This happens because other thoughtful players validate your choices as good ones
Russell's point was more about how we don't even really know what we think until we attempt to articulate ourselves and find our articulations dissatisfactory: https://t.co/uYLVcp1PKE
whereas Orwell's point is political – he argued that the quality of a language rises and falls in tandem with the quality of the society that uses it. Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking and vice versa, each becoming a catalyst for the other https://t.co/cFczlK90we
the implications here are staggering. it suggests that a handful of people being uncommonly, persistently deliberate in their work can have a transformative effect on society. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, perhaps its the only thing that ever has https://t.co/P6yu1RxDvE https://t.co/IZmAzgyRjQ
what's a minimum viable scene? if you have two sufficiently obsessive people who are trying to impress and outdo each other in public, two is enough but usually it seems that it takes a broader/wider scene to generate 2 such obsessive people https://t.co/N3qBkYWy12
the old world is always dying, the new one is always struggling to be born; now is always the time to be more nimble with one's words https://t.co/qIiNH18SWZ
this thread also makes me realise is that a big part of why I write is so I can think clearly without all of the inelegant clutter of (most) other people’s words, and models. It’s an act of compression. My goal is often to reproduce signal with less noise https://t.co/aPbOBPqysl
Borges was clued in too."The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us... into something which can last in man’s memory." Artists are in the business of remembrance. They tend to the connective tissue that holds us together https://t.co/h5km27HCwn
Faulkner, too. And countless other artists throughout history, many of them nameless, forgotten, unappreciated. We honor them in our work. They who sang and danced and kept the flame of human consciousness alight, amidst wretchedness and despair https://t.co/RoTxJ6IvRF
if you keep a personal record of what’s going on & you index your notes, in a decade or two - and honestly sometimes in just 3-5 years - you can become a very valuable asset to any community: a sort of human switchboard for meaningful history. Remember, the past is never dead... https://t.co/Trq8k4A21m
they are not them, they are us ✋🏾 https://t.co/hcN6mogN1k
CS Lewis: https://t.co/1zGSoy3Hax
“The greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become… useless synonyms for good or for bad.” - C.S. Lewis (Studies in Words)
@visakanv You are breathing me now This heart must find a way To give birth to my song As an eternal taste of today 🎶 https://t.co/5J0S4oKjc6