The work is what it means It is desirable to bear in mindâwhen dealing with the human maker at any rateâthat his chosen way of revelation is through his works. To persist in asking, as so many of us do, âWhat did you mean by this book?â is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker ââThe meaning of musicââââNo more than a sketchââââOn 'The Master and His Emissary'ââââOnly a mind opened to the quality of thingsââââTranslation is always a treasonââ meaningart
The quality without a name There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. There are words we use to describe this quality: alive whole comfortable free exact egoless eternal But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building ââNo words to describeââââThis language without wordsââ beautylifemeaningspirit
The meaning of objects The meaning of objects is harder to grasp than that of words. The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts meaningobjects
The meaning of music Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress ââThe work is what it meansââââNo more than a sketchââââOn 'The Master and His Emissary'ââ meaningmusic
A creature of bones, not words In building connections, [articulation work] builds meaning and identity, sorting out ontologies on the fly rather than mixing and matching between fixed and stable entities. Articulation lives first and foremost in practice, not representation; as its proper etymology suggests, it's a creature of bones, not words. When articulation fails, systems seize up, and our sociotechnical worlds become stuff, arthritic, unworkable. Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair meaning
The shape of the sentence You've been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning. You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains, Which means that while you were reading, All those millions of words passed by Without teaching you how to make sentences. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing meaningstructure
To build a folly To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again." Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better timesâa demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer. Smiljan RadiÄ, Death at Home ââDesigned to be ruinsââââFolliesââââThermal aediculaeââ meaningpurposeconstruction
Let the meaning choose the word What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get oneâs meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies meaningwords
Taboo your words Albert says that people have âfree will.â Barry says that people donât have âfree will.â Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by âfree will,â on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase âfree willâ at all. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies meaning
The arbitrariness of the sign A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual âlanguageâ is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word âhorseâ, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the signâs legibility lies in its difference from other signs. Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of âČâ â: The Bauhaus and Design Theory ââGods of the Wordââ soundmeaninglanguage
The eye does not see The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities meaningseeingimages
The utter nothingness of being Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs - but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesnât come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle. "But when we give up symbols and opinions, arenât we left in the utter nothingness of being?" Yes. Kimura KyĆ«ho, On the Mysteries of Swordsmanship ââThe Elements of Typographic Styleââ zenmeaningsymbolsbeingreality
Whereof one cannot speak My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ââWhat can be put into wordsââ meaning
Not knowing quite what they mean "Do you understand all the symbolism?" "Not really, besides its being Venus and Cupid." "I didn't even know that, so you're one up on me. I wish I'd read more about ancient mythology," she continued. "But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean." Alain de Botton, On Love meaning
Things cannot be other than as they are âIt is demonstrably true that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose.â â Professor Pangloss Voltaire, Candide purposemeaning
50 reds If one says âRedâ (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color perceptionmeaning
No words to describe If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary. Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics ââThe quality without a nameââââThis is Waterââ meaningwords
That is not it at all It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock meaning
A soft and fitful luster Who decided that the American public couldnât handle âa soft and fitful lusterâ? I canât help but think something has been lost. âA soft sparkle from a wet or oily surfaceâ doesnât just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, âthe fitful luster,â of, for example, an eye full of tears â which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than âa wet sidewalk.â Itâs as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poetâs ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off. James Somers, You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary meaningwords
Reference and Is-ness There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word. Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word meaningwords
The demand of a new word Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well? Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word wordslanguagemeaning
Apparency Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object and called it apparency. While art is not limited to this single end, he felt that one of its two basic functions was "to create images which by clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly comprehensible appearance." In his mind, this was an essential first step toward the expression of inner meaning. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City artmeaningimagesharmonyform
Fish and water How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end? Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology meaningwords
The word invents itself Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessityâhis words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King wordsmeaningnoveltyinvention
AI-art isnât art An Essay by Erik Hoel erikhoel.substack.com AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful. âŠJust as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldnât tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art. artconsciousnessbeautymeaningai
The Future Is Not Only Useless, Itâs Expensive An Article by Dan Brooks www.gawker.com This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something. ââA particular deficiency of which they all partakeââ technologyfuturismmeaning
The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music An Article by Maria Popova www.brainpickings.org The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance â not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed. ââMusic and ImaginationââââTo see is to forget the name of the thing one seesââââThe core assertionââ musicpoetryartmeaning
On 'The Master and His Emissary' AÂ Quote by Ian McGilchrist www.ttbook.org People who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is, and not in any other form, and that it transmits things that remain implicit ...Works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things. They are embodied in the words theyâre in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be. ââThe work is what it meansââââThe meaning of musicââââIf a book can be summarized, is it worth reading?ââ artmaterialmeaningform
A brief foray into vectorial semantics An Article by James Somers jsomers.net One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its âimportantâ words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. Thatâs the idea behind Amazon.comâs âStatistically Improbable Phrasesâ: Amazon.comâs Statistically Improbable Phrases, or âSIPsâ, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!âą program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. mathmeaningwordsnotetakingsearchchance
The way an oyster does A Fragment by Kay Ryan www.csmonitor.com Her poems, [Kay Ryan] says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "I think, 'What about those chickens?' " she says, "and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés." poetrymeaningcliché
The primacy of interpretation over sensation AÂ Fragment by Mark Liberman languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings. More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest. These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.) memorysensesmeaningspeechwords
The body image AÂ Quote The body image is informed fundamentally from haptic and orienting experiences early in life. Our visual images are developed later on, and depend for their meaning on primal experiences that were acquired haptically. ââMetaphors We Live ByââââGods of the WordââââThe Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Sensesââ bodymeaning
Meaningness AÂ Website by David Chapman meaningness.com The word âmeaningâ has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning. People also speak of âthe meaning of life.â That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply âmeaningnessâ only to the sorts of things one could describe as âdeeply meaningfulâ or âpretty meaningless.â meaninglife
The Pale King AÂ Novel by David Foster Wallace www.goodreads.com ââWe change them and are changedââââDisplacementââââWhat's wrong?ââââNarrative codesââââAn enormous machineââ+21 More boredombureaucracy
We change them and are changed "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed." â Frank Bidart, Borges and I changeidentity
What's wrong? Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. anxietylife
Narrative codes The idea, as both sides' counsel worked it out, is that you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities, & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of 'Once upon a time...' or 'Far, far away, there once dwelt...' or any of the other traditional devices that signaled the reader that what was under way was fiction and should be processed accordingly. For as everyone knows, whether consciously or not, there's always a kind of unspoken contract between a book's author and its reader; and the terms of this contract always depend on certain codes and gestures that the author deploys in order to signal the reader what kind of book it is, i.e., whether it's made up vs. true. And these codes are important, because the subliminal contract for nonfiction is very different from the one for fiction. writingreading
An enormous machine The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human. machinesconsciousnessbureaucracy
Abstruse dullness Consider, from the Service's perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it's interesting. boredominterest
To hide or dissemble Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. secretsgovernment
Distraction To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. boredommelancholyanxietyattentionpain
In a stare Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involved gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually straight aheadâa shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing itâhowever, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intense concentration. And now I too do this. attentionthinking
We infantilize ourselves Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don't understand much of the theoretical aspectâwhat I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizensâparts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. societygovernmentpoliticsmoralitycivics
Doubling Obetrolling didn't make me self-conscious. But it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they'd taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, 'I am in this room.' It's difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it 'doubling', but I'm still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room. drugsattention
Strings and clots The walls' texture was mostly smooth, but if you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave when they're paid by the job and not the hour and thus have no motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on. work
More by accident In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' orâ particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoesâ'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this wayâit happened more by accident. lifequestionshappiness
Wisdom This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to his never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood that adviceâeven wise adviceâactually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path. wisdom
No-nonsense Admittedly, though, however alert and aware I felt, I was probably more aware of the effects the lecture seemed to be having on me than of the lecture itself, much of which was over my head, and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute's presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or 'connecting' with the students. In other words, the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father's term 'no-nonsense', and why it was a term of approval. styleteaching
The pie has been made "In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentleman, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been madeâthe contest is now in the slicing." informationorganization
Midwest sunset For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun's appearance. It's just all of a sudden there. lightgeography
Test anxiety It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dreadâand it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about. anxietyattention
To fill in the gaps It would be easy to impose on the office a whole welter of detail, explanation, and background that was actually gleaned only later and not part of my arrival and dazed scurrying about with the Iranian Crisis at all. Which is a quirk of temporal memoryâone tends to fill in gaps with data acquired only later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord's exit through the back of the retina. memory
What hell is He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices. boredom
No place it hadn't already been He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn't already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners around him had heard it or were looking at him. time
The word invents itself Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessityâhis words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself. wordsmeaningnoveltyinvention
Unborable The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. successboredombureaucracy
Institutional structure 'That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn't realize, or like they couldn't realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn't a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution.' bureaucracy