Words as Obstacles

Photo by Alexandra on Unsplash

Often, we don’t say what we think; more often, we don’t write what we believe. The medium is the message.

Sometimes, however, we take the time to think about things, only to find ourselves ensnared by semantics. In the same vein, the minds of many people appear to be possessed, or otherwise entangled, by ideas and thoughts which appear meaningless when we think about them.

We, as a species, are in the habit of inventing artificial constructs, realizations of concepts, to name things, thereby divorcing them from their natural nameless forms. To name something is to guillotine that thing. Our minds have limited capacity, so we must make do with names and labels. We must abstract, which is the principal problem with language.

We use language as a means to convey what we believe to be meaning. Language is made up of words, of lines or strokes, of orthography. To differentiate between conveying meaning and having meaning: words, in and of themselves, as specks of inks or bits of pixels, do not have meaning; they have uses. Words are tools. They have no meaning the same way a sledgehammer has no meaning. Like sledgehammers, words are tools for specific purposes. Our words are tools for communicative and descriptive purposes.

Function-wise, words are agents of separation. If you approach any given thing and call it a particular thing, then…