Chris MessinaMay 16, 2023

"New words make new thoughts and feelings possible. As a collective we appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions. To invert a truism, the political is personal."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/magazine/couples-therapy-orna-guralnik.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New Is Happening in Relationships.

For more and more of Orna Guralnik’s patients, the ideas behind Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are leading to breakthroughs at home.

The New York Times
Show threadThomas KitchensMay 16, 2023

@chrismessina I have no problem with the article as a whole, but "New words make new thoughts and feelings possible" really grinds my gears. I know it's nitpicky, but they were perfectly possible before giving them a word, otherwise you'd never have to create a word to express them to others. That portion of linguistic relativity is rejected by modern linguists.

Again, it doesn't change the article. "New words make it possible to express new thoughts and feelings" works as well.

Show threadThomas KitchensMay 16, 2023
@chrismessina Of course, that phrasing still favors the group in power, because the thoughts and feelings would only be new to them.
Show threadChris Messina

@CalmlyBallistic I'm not so sure. New terminology can help the group in power to rediscover something that other groups have known or experienced, but that the existing language has lost its power.

Snow Crash has a lot to say about this, IIRC.

May 17, 2023 at 2:41amWeb
Show threadThomas KitchensMay 17, 2023
@chrismessina I have to be misunderstanding you right now. The Ur-language in the book isn't real, at least not in the control-people's-brains-in-a-virus way. The most comparable real thing would be proto-Indo-European. It wouldn't surprise me to learn words for ideas of that time period have been lost to the eons, though I'd expect most of those would be related to their rituals and less-frequently used words, the same way languages shed words today. Linguistic natural selection.
Show threadChris MessinaMay 17, 2023

@CalmlyBallistic Discussing linguistics 500-characters at a time elides nuance that I'm sure is present in each of our respective thoughts! :)

I'm suggesting that some words become shades of their original meaning by overuse: commoditized. Introducing new words for the same phenomena can reinvigorate awareness or attention to a known/lived experience that never lost its alacrity with another group.

I'm suggesting that overuse of language/particular words can dull empathic pathways.