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Re: "Dear fellow residents of Babel On"
@gyaradong Yep.. been there.
In typical conversation, a lot of the confusion seems rooted in the incessant use of what I keep trying to tell my wife are "useless words", because their meaning presupposes and, thus, depends almost entirely upon the speaker's specific physical context (bodily location, body/eyes height, head orientation, etc.) that listeners couldn't possibly have since only one body can occupy said context at a given time: e.g. 'this', 'that', 'here', or 'there' (sometimes accompanied by equally useless pointing).
Then there are words with duplicate meanings.
Then there are different words that sound the same even though spelled differently (e.g. there/their/they're).
And then there's the private conceptual context mentioned in previous posts.
Of course, that fuzziness can be glorious in writing. Just yesterday I was rehearsing Lennon's "The Ballad of John and Yoko", and (in my opinion) a phenomenal example of that is at the end of this verse:
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton Talking in our beds for a week The news people said, "Say what you doing in bed?" I said, "We're only trying to get us some peace"
where I've long thought he was being intensely clever on the word 'peace' given how a bed is an ideal place to "get us some PIECE"... right?
Anyway....
2023-11-01 · 3 days ago
Dear fellow residents of Babel On — Seeing the phrase "Tower of Babel" again earlier today had me remembering a favorite quote: "the words are mine; the meaning is you", which suggests - if not insists - our sum total of beliefs about reality and ourselves so utterly colors/filters/distorts the meaning of words that we essentially have little or no chance of understanding each other via the medium of words. That doesn't mean we can't *believe* such isn't the case, of course, because who doesn'...