#Language: the oldest trick

Language is magic. Old magic.

We're so used to it that we don't see it, but think about it. While you are reading this, I have the capability to inject my thoughts into your mind. I can control your mind! And even more magically, I can do this while being miles away, or I might even be dead. My mind to your mind. You don't need to be a Vulcan, just start writing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing We don't know exactly when humans started to use language. But we can be sure it was before we started to write. The capacity to use and create language seems built into our DNA, literally. It is one thing that clearly separates us from our fellow Earth-dwellers. Scientists guesstimate that our earliest forays into language started somewhere between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago. What that language was like is unknowable. We do know that, when we finally decided to start to write something, language was already splintered into many, many different and incompatible versions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing

The one constant in our use of language seems to be that every generation mutates the language they use. There is no human language, in actual everyday use, that survives for long periods without large changes. To use language is to change it. Which is fitting, because the world around us changes, so to describe it, we need a changing medium.

There is an actual wizard who has thought about this.

Alan Moore Language as magic Alan Moore, who writes books and comics and also calls himself a magician, has a useful idea of magic. But unlike what you may expect, it's not about smoke and mirrors, or pulling rabbits out of a hat. Instead, he says, magic is the deliberate use of stories, language, to change someone's consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Moore

In that view, there is the physical world, made of bodies and stones and rain and hunger. And then there is the imagined world: countries and borders, money, laws, gods, companies. These things are not fake. But they do not exist in the same way a stone exists. They exist because enough people believe in them.

Language is how we imagine our world, then we make our imagination reality. This is why language is magic in a very practical sense.

Computer programs make this even stranger. A program starts as something imagined. Then the computer runs it. A message is sent, money moves or a robot arm turns. The imaginary is made real.

But what if we don't have the words that allow a thought to exist?

Guy Steele Growing a Language https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf Guy Steele talks about this, in a very nerdy, maybe even wizardly way in a talk called Growing a Language. He starts with an absurdly small language and then slowly grows it while speaking. If he needs a word that isn't already allowed, he first defines it using words that are. The talk is funny, painful, and very effective because you can feel the cost of missing words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

If the language has no word for the thing you mean, you have to build the thought out of smaller thoughts. You have to define everything in detail. Every time.

That is why naming is not decoration. When you add the right word, you don't just shorten the sentence. You change what can be said easily, and what can be said easily has a much better chance of being said at all.