Language Studies

I don’t have a second language. I have some block against it and for that I am sorry. I’d like you to try to learn a new language. But I don’t mean it like you think I mean it.

In Don Delillo’s Underworld there’s a great scene where the protagonist gets schooled by a priest about not understanding shoes. The priest argues that because the kid doesn’t know the names of the parts of the shoe, that he really doesn’t know much about the shoe, cause like, all he sees is the shoe, not all of its constituent parts.

And now I feel silly for giving you a description of a scene from a novel. But it does illustrate what I’m talking about. I would like you to spend some time learning a language like that. This means something like a technical language, or a niche language, or some form of cultural jargon. You have your pick, because it should be something that you are interested in, but maybe don’t actually have the words for yet. Once you have the words, you’ll be able to think about it in a much more detailed way. Fine grained is a term that gets tossed around a lot.

Some of this is awful, some of this is great. Business jargon, I find awful. But even that, once learned, will serve you as a suit of armour with which to repel horrific attacks by the man. I’d personally rather learn about blacksmithing or animal husbandry or something. But again…your call.

It turns out that wikipedia is a good resource for this. But I’d additionally challenge you to really learn these terms, not to trust that that ruinous wiki will forever store the knowledge for you. Cause really, you shouldn’t trust your knowledge to potential server crashes.