More ideas on language

John Brockman

Scientists who discover new species, new planets, new concepts or whatever also need to be adept at discovering new words to describe them. While reading This Idea Is Brilliant, John Brockman's collection of essays about "lost, overlooked and underappreciated scientific concepts," I often noticed new words, or at least words new to me. Usually these new words just gave a new twist to already existing words.

Take fallibilism as an example. According to researcher and anthropologist Oliver Scott Curry, fallibilism is "the idea that we can never be 100-percent certain we're right and must therefore be open to the possibility that we're wrong." Other such words in the book include complementarity, objectivities, hermiticity, intersubjectivity, optimality, satisficing and frequentist. Try using each of these words in a sentence. My speller challenged all of them.

Last Friday I began writing about ideas (brilliant or otherwise) about language found in Brockman's book. Here are some others:

Nothing is named after its discoverer.

This thought is found in an essay by journalist William Poundstone, but it is actually Stigler's law of eponymy, named for statistician Stephen Sigler who coined it in 1980 (but presumably did not discover it). Poundstone gives such examples as Occam's razor, Halley's comet and Gresham's law.  Yesterday in a novel I found it mentioned that the Doppler effect was known long before Christian Doppler came along.

Examples outside science include the Hudson River, Columbus, Ohio, and America.

Our vast vocabulary arose more for the purposes of seduction than anything else.

Rory Sutherland doesn't give much support to this idea in his essay. Still it's an interesting idea. Human beings probably didn't need much of a vocabulary to go hunting (when silence would be a good idea), to grow crops or raise children. But impressing a potential mate? One can never have too many words.

Putting an experience into words can result in failures of memory about that experience.

This idea comes from linguist N.J. Enfield. Can it possibly be true? I think it can, but if it is it has significance for courtroom trials, congressional hearings, books, newspapers, conversations ... any time memories are turned into words. I have always thought that writing about the books I read helps me remember them. And that is true, except perhaps what I remember is mostly what I wrote about a book, not the book itself.

Enfield writes that what he calls "verbal overshadowing" can change our beliefs about is true. He refers to languages as "filters for reality." Of course, language has always been an attempt to express reality, not reality itself. It is why even the best writers must struggle so hard  to convey the truth.