Sometimes when (if) I proofread what I write I notice that I will have completely left out whole words from sentences, words without which the sentence doesn’t make a lot of, at least in the absence appropriate context. I find that it happens most often when I pause to think. As if that word is a cliffhanger that never made it on the page, except there’s less drama and more confusion.
Language is a crazy thing. I’ve always thought of as separate from the various things that separate humans from other animals, but the more I think about it the more I realize it really just falls in the category of abstract thinking; our ability to believe in/ assign value to things that don’t have “concrete” existence (at least that’s my understanding of the concept of abstract thinking, please correct me if that’s not quite accurate [though saying such a thing reinforces the point I’m about to try to make]). Among other things in that category are money, religion, and crypto (which is like abstract-ception). These things have value because we say they do. There’s function and purpose to it of course, that’s why from an evolutionary standpoint it stuck around and helped humans be so “successful” in such a meteoric fashion. We use made-up symbols and sounds to communicate ideas about made-up things that we associate with tangible things, but only with people who believe in the same made-up sounds, symbols and things.
But these beliefs run so deep that even if important made-up things are we can still often make sense the idea being communicated, even if we are talking to someone we’ve never met before who just happens to share our abstract beliefs. Or in some cases we can even use a key or a decoder to relate our made-up beliefs to the completely different made-up beliefs of another person.
Or sometimes those symbols and sounds can be used to talk about something completely meaningless and non-sensical that only makes sense in the mind of someone who likes to talk about things he doesn’t fully understand.
nANIMOv 