Comment:

This is, of course, not the first time that these three have toyed with the concept of altering human consciousness by altering language. With the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis elevated to a Law, how could you not?

Of course, the first comparison that comes to mind is Orwell's 1984, where control of language is used to prevent people from criticizing Big Brother, but I think we can agree that that's not how communication actually works. Far more relevant and realistic in the twenty-first century, perhaps, is the proliferation of linguistic memes and the way they can smuggle new connotations into otherwise anodyne statements.

Before its tragic collapse, one of the best sources for these neologisms was Twitter - think of "milkshake duck" or "leopards eating people's faces party". These terms are opaque for anyone outside of a particular bubble, yet, within the bubble, they become easy shorthand for "otherwise frivolous celebrity who we all now must shun" and "voting against your own interests because you wanted to hurt other people", respectively. But both phrases carry even more meaning than that, don't they? They carry an emotional weight, they carry an attitude, they carry an implication that the speaker is making some sort of joke (or is, at least, aware of a joke), and - most importantly - they indicate that the speaker is a part of a particular online subculture, friendly to insiders and hostile (or, at least, difficult) for outsiders.

Consider how online content creators have to use euphemisms to get around keyword-based censorship ("unalive" instead of "kill", for example), and how those euphemisms then creep into casual parlance even when Youtube or Twitch isn't listening. Consider how political movements are abbreviated into slogans, and then safely dismissed because the slogan is too simplistic or aggressive. Consider how yesterday's diagnostic term or philosophical thought experiment becomes the dismissive insult of today and the banned slur of tomorrow. Spare a moment of sympathy, perhaps, for the actual humans (lovely people, I'm sure) named Karen.

What changes would you make to the lexicon, if you could do so deliberately? What words would you censor (or change their meaning, or encourage a wane in popularity) and why? When an entire worldview or manifesto or perspective can be boiled down to a single phrase, does that thought become more common as it becomes easier to say (or fit into a tweet, or onto a sign)? When the implications of a phrase inevitably drift over time, can the original thought remain? How would you feel, if one of the terms you currently use to define yourself expands to include people that don't share your experience, or contracts to exclude you?

What thoughts are you currently incapable of formulating, simply because you don't yet know the words to express them?

Who wrote your dictionary, and what do they want?

Transcript:

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0381– 2167/07/07/11:34- LC’s apartment, living room
LC: Okay, so how the hell do we make an experiment for a falsifiable proposition about epistemology if “epistemology” is only a thing because Aristotle was too stupid to define their terms properly?
Zoa: Well, that’s just it: a simplified language isn’t necessarily “wrong” or “stupid”. If you have limited use cases, a mode of communication with fewer terms can actually be much more efficient.
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Doc: You’re proposing an experiment in which isolated groups of humans use different languages with varying degrees of fidelity vis-à-vis knowledge and the acquisition thereof, and we quantify whether inefficiency due to misunderstandings outweighs inefficiency caused by a needlessly complex verbiage?
Zoa: ...I wasn’t, but I am now! Is that a thing that we can do?
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LC: I think we may have trouble finding volunteers willing to unlearn their native languages and only speak conlangs with different gradations of specificity about Gigahordens so that we can tally up how much time they waste confusing each other.
Zoa: Certainly not before tomorrow’s class, yeah.
Doc: Ah, but we may not need human volunteers if we can simulate them!
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LC: Is simulating crowds of human minds speaking different languages a thing that you can do, as a psychology machine?
Doc: I might be able to, if the majority of my onboard memory wasn’t still being occupied with increasingly convoluted metaphors of emotional states and psychological disorders standing in for fantasy plotlines so that I can remember what a “Gigahorden” is.
Zoa: Yeah, inefficiency in communication is a hell of a thing.
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