In my essay on handholds, I noted that perhaps that very essay could itself be a handhold for the idea of handholds (too much!).

That brings me to another thing I’ve been considering lately, how language is this weird squishy thing that we all use together to communicate, but really the words themselves are meaningless without shared understanding and experiences. I think I got off on this thought line reading some Alan Watts where he explored this idea.

Basically, a word only means what we all (for some value of “all”) agree it means. And that’s really useful, of course, because then we can put some effort into expressing the ideas underlying a particular concept, and agree on a sort of shorthand for that entire concept or thought or whatever.

So e.g. if I just were to say to some random person “I love making conceptual handholds for people”, they might be kinda confused. But if they were to read my piece on handholds, they’d understand perfectly what I mean.

And that’s really handy! Especially as ideas spread within a group/subculture/whatever, you can save a lot of time and energy and talking and whatever by being able to refer to an entire concept with just a few words.

That’s kinda what I was getting at with this tweet:

https://x.com/tnorthcutt/status/1914411366942675118

Perhaps one reason why shared experiences are so powerful is that language is a very crude way to describe things, and so a shared experience is far more real and clear than a discussion or explanation

So having the shared experience is an important prerequisite to the shared understanding that underpins a piece of language. One kind of shared experience is “hey we both have read this same essay, so we know what handhold means”. Probably more meaningful/richer/higher fidelity is an experience that was shared together and is now referred to with shorthand. Huh, inside jokes are a form of this, and are kind of a way of calling back to that meaningful shared experience. People really love inside jokes, don’t they?!? That’s probably a lot of why – they’re a shorthand way of saying “this thing we experienced together was meaningful, and I care about you, and about having experiences with you”.

I suppose the trouble with language that serves as shorthand (which is really all of it) is when we think we agree on what it’s a shorthand for, but oops, it turns out we don’t. If we notice that, we can do something about it, but I think very very very often people think they agree, or not even consciously think that but just assume it, and they don’t realize that the disagreement is even happening. How many arguments/disagreements/fights/whatever are like this? Probably a lot!

So language is fallible, but it’s also a pretty neat thing! Actually maybe it’s not fallible; it’s the humans using it who are fallible, and who probably need to establish an agreed upon understanding of what language refers to. Maybe that’s a good default response to a disagreement, even – are we disagreeing about the thing we’re talking about, or are we disagreeing about the meaning of the language we’re using?