Hi friends, how are you?
I was just thinking of a couple of funny stories of when my mother cutely used the wrong words that resulted in unexpected funnies, a phenomenon known as “malapropism“.
But actually I want to use the stories as a jump off point to pick up where we last left off in this previous post specifically: “the most underrated magic that human has access to: creating a shared language to encode a concept”.
What do you want for dinner? A micro fibre wipe?
A quick background: my parents run a motorbike repair shop, so I grew up familiar with different names and brands of spare parts and repair treatments.
So yesterday my mother was trying to recall the name of a birthday cake we got at one point. She said, “you know, that cake, what is it called, mitsu…” As I was racking my brain trying to autocomplete her thought, she spewed out, “what’s the itsu.. Idemitsu?” I burst out laughing because Idemitsu is a brand of an engine lubricant. It still took me 5-10 seconds to realise she’s looking for the word tiramisu!
Then one time, we were talking about this hotel my brother was staying at, The Pullman Hotel. She then said, “hmm we have stayed in that hotel, no? The name sounds familiar”. I said, “hmm, I don’t think so. We have stayed at Padma though”. I continued sharing a couple of other names of hotels possibly starting with “P” or that rhymes with Pullman. Then I jokingly said, “you aren’t confusing it with ‘pull-pump’ (fuel pump) are you?” And yes apparently she was. We had a good laugh at it.
One last small example of malapropism, before we talk about words as approximator of ideas, and symbols as abstractions of our human experience.
She once mistakenly called a local curry shop we frequent, called Tabona, as “kanebo” — which is this yellow micro fibre wipe commonly used for cars and sports towel (as well as a well-known Japanese brand that specializes in cosmetics and skincare products, but she’s definitely not thinking about this latter entity).
Words can conjure images and unexpected juxtaposition of images can trigger humour. Surprising twists and unexpected connections are key elements in humour. We laugh when something breaks or defies our logical expectations of acceptable reality or norm.
The two superpowers of humans
As we know, most problems are people problems and most people problems are alignment problems. Because a word can have multiple interpretations depending on the surrounding context, to create and strengthen shared languages is critical to enabling cooperation and minimising miscommunication. Having a shared language will help us communicate our vision/version of reality. A shared language helps reduce friction in decision making and execution.
But no, I don’t think a passive, direct, brain-to-brain interfacing is the right level of attack for this problem of “knowledge transfer”. More about this some time.
Given the infiniteness of human imagination, our ability to keep creating and evolving shared languages is perhaps the second most important superpowers that humans have. Why the second? Because I think our imagination is our most potent superpower. We advance civilisation by abstracting, creating symbols and shared languages. We imagine it, we give it a name, then we build on top of it.
To have inside jokes is to have a friend. To have shared language is to have a community. To have people with whom you encode the same concepts in the same words is to belong. We see this all the time. If you’re on social media the past year or so, you’d have seen these memes jabbing “gen Z lingo“. Generational slangs are one tool to create in-group x out-group dynamics. The lingos change all the time, but our tendency to personalise our group and forge a sense of belonging is permanent.
Jargons are useful, to some degree, in some contexts
Alan Alda: Words do matter—and you might be using them all wrong
When people in the same profession have a word that stands for five pages of written knowledge, then why say five pages of stuff when you can say one word? And if the other person understands it exactly the way you understand it, then jargon has usefulness.
The trouble is we develop such specialized words that they’re not understood by people at just a little distance from our expertise. But jargon has another evil use aside from separating us from one another, and that is that when we want to use it to make ourselves look really smart. “I’m smart, I talk like this. You can’t really talk like this, so you’re not as smart as me.” A lot of us do this unconsciously, and it’s not necessary.
In software development (and science & engineering in general), getting familiar with design patterns == acquiring new vocabularies. It allows us to iteratively think in higher levels of concepts and generate new theories that others can build upon.
In fiction-writing, Ken Liu wrote (almost exactly 1 year ago) for Slate in The Imitation Game
Every author worth reading ultimately invents her own language, her idiolect that repurposes the existing shared language in a new direction, uniquely suited to portraying the world as only she can see it, unmistakable for anyone else’s.
Language is the most diverse around the equator because human are more self-sufficient there
Reminds me of an interesting theory by behavioral scientist Daniel Nettle. He was asking the question: “why are most of the world’s languages found in the tropics?”
He argues that the reason for this pattern is the longer growing season in the tropical regions. People living in these parts of the world therefore have more food security, making them more self-sufficient. By contrast, the shorter growing season in temperate and cold zones makes it more likely that people have to rely on neighbors within a larger geographical area in case of crop failure, and having a common language facilitates such social agreements.
From the paper, Explaining global patterns of language diversity
The six and a half thousand languages spoken by humankind are very unevenly distributed across the globe. Language diversity generally increases as one moves from the poles toward the equator and is very low in arid environments.
Two belts of extremely high language diversity can be identified. One runs through West and Central Africa, while the other covers South and South-East Asia and the Pacific. Most of the world’s languages are found in these two areas. This paper attempts to explain aspects of the global distribution of language diversity. It is proposed that a key factor influencing it has been climatic variability.
Where the climate allows continuous food production throughout the year, small groups of people can be reliably self-sufficient and so populations fragment into many small languages. Where the variability of the climate is greater, the size of social network necessary for reliable subsistence is larger, and so languages tend to be more widespread.
Bonus, while we’re on this
Language first or thinking first?
In John Shotter’s paper, “More than Cool Reason: Withness-thinking’ or ‘systemic thinking'”, (via John L. Jerz,
Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments” (no.242), and those around us teach us such judgments not by giving us explanations, but simply by saying things like: “No, that’s not it, try again,” and so on, until at last they feel they can say: “Yes, that’s it.” Wittgenstein (1953) notes, “This is simply what searching, this is what finding, is like here” (p.218).
Thus, like James, Wittgenstein also begins by focusing on shared phenomena, upon often un-nameable shared experiences. He describes the beginning of a set of shared language intertwined activities (what he calls a “language-game”) thus: “The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop.
Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ [Goethe]” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.31)… Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination” (1969, no.475)3. “But what is the word “primitive” meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (1981, no.541).
Other funnies
Only the past 2-3 years or so I begun to realise the actual names of a couple of spare parts I have only been aurally familiar with: “byclip” (bike lift) and “kampas rem” (canvas brake). I’m sure there are more, but these two are what came to my mind right now.
