CCXIV - guesswork

How do you learn a new word? Say a word you've never heard of before. Rubric. Parse. Jargon. Juxtaposition. God, when I read Augusto Roa Bastos' I, the Supreme, he's literally making up new words, part English, Spanish and indigenous Guarani. It's confusing. But he leaves hints as to what they mean. That's the secret. You guess what the words mean by their context, and you think, ok, maybe a similar word or phrase could be substituted there. Framework. Break down into little pieces, like a computer processor. Technical language. Side by side comparison. And so on. And by that process you apply the mental understanding of those concepts to the new word. You apply the mental characterisations, the potential uses and abuses, the possibility for doublespeak, hidden mirth, cryptic humor and subtextual intent. It evokes appropriate measures of memory, fear, anxiety, outrage, annoyance, envy, or perhaps the lighter elements. You understand.

That incidentally is what Steven Pinker warns about when he warns of the power of euphemisms (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011). When you use a euphemism, such as "collateral damage" instead of "civilian casualties", you're not only making it sound more palatable. To some extent, you're avoiding the natural way that people apply their mental, empathetic, contextual faculties. The message misses them by. Of course, add a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance reduction (a healthy tendency to avoid thinking horrible thoughts if possible), and these things just don't register. That's the true danger of doublespeak (shoutout to the great, and truly immortal, Orwell), censorship, re-shaping language, and so on.

I think it was Wittgenstein that reformulated, in his mildly absurd way, that words are equivalent to ideas.

"The move to thought, and thereafter to language, is perpetrated with the use of Wittgenstein’s famous idea that thoughts, and propositions, are pictures—“the picture is a model of reality” (TLP 2.12). Pictures are made up of elements that together constitute the picture. Each element represents an object, and the combination of elements in the picture represents the combination of objects in a state of affairs. The logical structure of the picture, whether in thought or in language, is isomorphic with the logical structure of the state of affairs which it pictures."
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#TracLogiPhil)