Obscure Sorrows

Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
Énouement : The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people awa,. even close friends who you really like.
Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
Vemodalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
Ellipsism: A sadness that you'll never be able to know how history will turn out.
Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster - to survive a plane crash. or to lose everything in a fire.
Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
Riickkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore.
Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body. that inhabits only one place at a time.
Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you've always had - the same boring flaws and anxieties that you've been gnawing on for years.
Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective. 

-- John Koenig, https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com 

Unseen Law

[...] adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. Ifs an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't exist. -- Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence

Actually, there are a couple of small exceptions. Little Red Riding Hood may be perfectly ordered, but the Big Bad Wolf seems to be breaking all the laws of linguistics. Why does Bad Big Wolf sound so very, very wrong? What happened to the rules? Well, in fact, the Big Bad Wolf is just obeying another great linguistic law that every native English speaker knows, but doesn’t know that they know. And it’s the same reason that you’ve never listened to hop-hip music. You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You just wouldn’t know which one.

Reduplication in linguistics is when you repeat a word, sometimes with an altered consonant (lovey-dovey, fuddy-duddy, nitty-gritty), and sometimes with an altered vowel: bish-bash-bosh, ding-dang-dong. If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O. Mish-mash, chit-chat, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, tip-top, hip-hop, flip-flop, tic tac, sing-song, ding dong, King Kong, ping pong. -- Mark Forsyth [link]

Ambiguity and Authority

Sometimes people use "respect" to  mean "treating someone like a person"  and sometimes they use "respect" to  mean "treating someone like an  authority" and sometimes people who are used to  being treated like an authority say "if you  won't respect me I won't respect you"  and they mean "if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a  person"  and they think they're being fair but they  aren't, and it's not okay.-- Anon.

Spectra

I want to murderize the term "objective truth".  Because mostly it just means "This is one of my core beliefs".  By scrapping that term, and instead saying "All beliefs are subjective, but some have more evidence in their foundations than others, and this is a difference in degree, not of kind" we can begin to stop fortifying our misconceptions with language. Those things are well-entrenched enough as it is. [...] Fact is whatever is out there in the world, the ding-am-sich. Facts are objective, but you don't have any. Nobody has access to facts. We have beliefs about facts. And those beliefs are formed exclusively from the evidence available to us, as subjects. That evidence can be wrong or misleading. You have no facts. All we have is what you so weaseley call "opinions" (a better word is beliefs). And some beliefs are more well-founded than others. Our most well-founded beliefs, however, are not discernible to us from our core beliefs. They all feel "objective" to us, no way for the individual to know which "objective fact" (actually subjective belief) is strongly held because of evidence, and which is strongly held because of cultural values on happens to hold. So we need to drop that bullshit and start instead lifting our burdens of evidence, even for the stuff our amygdala says is "objective".

Is 1+1=2 a fact?   Of course not, it never was. Maths is an artificial system. 1+1=2 because we define the system so as to give that result. Of course, arithmetic was designed to mimic certain features of reality, but this was done as an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. Each abstraction makes the result less real - but easier to work with. The way we built arithmetic is perfectly analogous to how each child learns arithmetic. First you look at real objects, and produce a theory of kind, then you learn to count real objects, by grouping them in various kinds, abstracting away the individuality of the objects. Then you progress to imagined objects. Then you progress to removing all the remaining remnants of the reality you based it on, working instead with just numbers. -- Andreas Geisler

"A well-made language is no indifferent thing; not to go beyond physics, the unknown man who invented the word heat devoted many generations to error. Heat has been treated as a substance, simply because it was designated by a substantive, and it has been thought indestructible". The Foundations of Science, Henri Poincaré

Distância

As palavras representam um compromisso de significados. Cada imagem do mundo, cada pessoa, encontra na linguagem uma tradução comum, uma comunicação privilegiada com os outros. Mas esta tradução tem falhas, desacordos que passam sem ser anunciados sendo, com suficiente azar, fontes de tragédia. A maioria das palavras não aparentam ter este problema, como 'formiga', 'unha', 'amarelo'. Infelizmente, porque decerto não é coincidência, palavras com impacto social, como 'política', 'igualdade' ou 'juramento', são riquíssimas em equívocos. Veja-se esta última, 'juramento'. Detenho dois significados distintos desta palavra: (i) o intuito de respeitar a promessa feita independentemente do contexto, ou (ii) o intuito de respeitar a promessa só enquanto os pressupostos iniciais continuem a ser respeitados. A distância entre estas duas interpretações é a distância que separa, por exemplo, um energúmeno com farda de um polícia.

Metáforas

Citações retiradas do livro Metaphors we live by (1981) por George Lakoff e Mark Johnson, sobre a importância da metáfora não só na linguagem, mas no aparelho cognitivo humano.

"The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. [...] The most important claim [...] is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system.

[Chapter 6]

Just as the basic experiences of human spatial orientations give rise to orientational metaphors, so our experiences with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances. [...] Ontological metaphors are necessary for even attempting to deal rationally with our experiences.

The range of ontological metaphors that we use for such purposes is enormous. [...] Ontological metaphors like [THE MIND IS A MACHINE] are so natural and so pervasive in our thought that they are usually taken as self-evident, direct descriptions of mental phenomena. The fact that they are metaphorical never occurs to most of us. We take statements like "He cracked under pressure" as being directly true or false. [...] We use ontological metaphors to comprehend events, actions, activities, and states. Events and actions are conceptualized metaphorically as objects, activities as substances, states as containers.

[Chapter 7]

Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities. [...] personification is a general category that covers a very wide range of metaphors, each picking out different aspects of a person or ways of looking at a person. What they all have in common is that they are extensions of ontological metaphors and that they allow us to make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms—terms that we can understand on the basis of our own motivations, goals, actions, and characteristics.

[Chapter 19]

metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.). This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system.

Abuso

As figuras de estilo são abusos de linguagem. Mas sem esses abusos, as pontes que nos ligam aos outros e às coisas seriam impossíveis. A boa educação, no limite, é insustentável.

Dissolução

"Imagine a language in which, instead of saying ‘I found nobody in the room’ one said, ‘I found Mr. Nobody in the room.’ Imagine the philosophical problems that would arise out of such a convention." Wittgenstein, The Blue Book

Sci-Philosophy II

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. These idea systems are limited by language. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts must move. If we seek new validity forms, we must step outside the language.

What was instinct? An innate pattern impressed on the nervous system.

To remove a man's delusions is to create a vacuum. What rushes into that vacuum?[...] It's normal to share the delusions of one's society. It's abnormal to develop private delusions.

Societies don't believe they can die. It must follow that a society, as such, does not worship at all. If it cannot die, it'll never face a final judgment.

Every system and every interpretation becomes false in the light of a more complete system. I wonder if that's why you're here -- to remind us no positive statement may be made that's free from contradictions. Frank Herbert, - The Santaroga Barrier

Composição

Há uma analogia próxima entre programar, escrever e compor. São actividades combinatórias que usam um número limitado de conceitos e vocabulários para produzir um ilimitado de possibilidades. No caso da escrita produz-se textos, expõe-se argumentos; na música são compostas canções, sonatas, sinfonias; na programação escreve-se programas, resolve-se problemas. Qualquer uma precisa de prática, seja de ler livros, ouvir obras, interpretar código, seja de escrever histórias, músicas ou algoritmos. Em todas existem os elementos técnicos a aprender e reproduzir pelo aluno, em todas a arte de criar e romper fronteiras do mestre.

Mistério

Um texto que não possui conteúdo não pode estar errado e é, assim, imune à crítica ou à passagem do tempo. Como um liquido sem viscosidade, desliza imune por qualquer tentativa de interpretação ou refutação. Contra o ruído não se ganham discussões.

Separação

Para deixar claro a distinção entre meio e código, escrevia em Morse nos chats e enviava PDFs por telégrafo.

Nada

Como é possível não querer ler? Passar pela vida e, podendo, escrever nada?

Gravação

Cada instante, cada palavra dita, cada gesto feito são ecos, talvez espelhos, do contexto que os engloba. Por cada que se grava - na memória, numa fita, nessa página antes branca - guarda-se algo mais desse tudo que vemos, dia a dia, passar.

Propriedade

Onde residem esses segredos cujo decifrar nos enche de ânsia? Entre a crua e violenta apatia lá fora e o turbilhão incessante cá dentro há, exposto, um querer atribuir coberto no verniz da linguagem. É este refazer de mundo que chamamos nosso, onde, só então, podemos cavar buracos e neles tapar mistérios.

Caminhos

Numa frase o fluxo das palavras forma um enredo de sentidos porque em cada palavra, em cada ligar, uma rede de influências, um conjunto de janelas a iluminar-se mutuamente por onde as frases que a vizinham ajudam a entender. Neste labirinto de ambiguidades quão ingrato o papel de tradutor, quanto desafio no do leitor, que caminho atravessado nesse do escritor.

Refocagem

A palavra 'eu' é uma abreviatura para o nós que nos habita. 'Eu' é o resultado, a cada instante, da multidão que se congrega, degladia e se constrói numa pessoa e à invariante que sobressai dessa dialéctica chamamos personalidade. Eu (e tu) não somos o ponto final no qual orbitam as coisas, somos, apenas e tanto, a trajectória de um discurso.

Intersecção

O dicionário é o esforço desesperado de fixar o vento que são as palavras. Se fores ao teu e procurares 'amizade' vês-te nessa explicação? E 'azul'? Quando conversas com alguém tantas as diferenças entre os vossos mundos, quão ténue a ponte que vos liga.

Paisagem

Na palavra expressa esconde-se uma paisagem raramente pensada. No filigrana de cada frase, na estrutura da sua gramática, o reflexo de um real observado em séculos de civilização. E cada vez que as usamos, de cada vez que elas nos socorrem, esses átomos de língua tecem a rede onde todos nos baloiçamos, pairando acima desse mundo medido assim à nossa imagem.