The Word Exchange

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one.

Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can’t go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we’ve seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what’s not. The Word, after all, is God.

In Japanese, koi no yokan means the ineluctable feeling you have, upon meeting someone for the first time, that eventually the two of you will fall in love.

Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased.

But let me say this, and I'll say it only once: don't fool yourself into thinking you're just on a detour as you sail home for Ithaca. A little pit stop, if you like, with the Lotus-Eaters or Calypso. There's no Athena interceding on your behalf. No guarantee you'll eventually arrive. If there's something you really want in life - especially if it's something that scares you, or you think you don't deserve - you have to go after it and do it now. Or in the very long you'll be right: you won't deserve it.

Language is incarnate. It’s the way our bodies evolved—to stand upright, to walk—that enables us to speak at all. And it’s our senses that give us reasons to talk. We want to verify with others what we seem to perceive. It’s also our bodies that give our words urgency: the tiny ticking clocks in each of our cells. Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can’t go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we’ve seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what’s not. The Word, after all, is God. Some

One single word – like EMERGENCY, or love – can revise a whole night. A whole life.

No one worried about the bends we might get from progress; we just let ourselves fly higher up.

If I was missing out on things, they were things I didn’t think to miss.

In the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.

The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has issued a promulgation that every U.S. citizen “unplug” for at least two hours each day. location 6374

I found that reading gave me a certain relief – one form of escapism that seemed safe, and maybe more than safe. I felt saner – less fragmented- after reading for an hour. location 3234

Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.” Language seems like proof that there’s such a thing as meaning. That we’re all connected, now and forever. Words don’t always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go back on their word, say things they don’t believe. But connection, with ourselves and others, is the only way we can live.

Creation is collaboration,” as

The trick of switching words’ meanings is one of the oldest in the book. Just think of “freedom” and “democracy” … Ultimately, it’s a problem of shortsightedness. An addiction to what’s next. People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up. Fabricate the “news.” Invent their own “analysis.” We’ve been doing that for years. It seems only natural that eventually we’d move on to manufacturing words.… But Synchronic didn’t invent accelerated obsolescence. As a nation we’ve been practicing mass production since before World War II. We believed wastefulness would morph, by magic, into wealth. That if we created enough disposable products, it would help fire consumerism. And it did, for a while. But here’s a dirty secret: resources are finite. Waste enough, and eventually it’s all used up. Language, too. You can’t just coin a word, use it once, and toss it out. But language is just the latest casualty. We always think there’s more of everything, even as we deplete it. Not just petroleum or gold, glacial ice or water, bandwidth. Now even our thoughts and memories are disposable.

Although, as you well know, dictionary sales to laymen have been waning for a long time. As books have gone out of print and we’ve moved from reading to “consuming data streams,” “texting” rather than writing—as Memes have become king—the average consumer has had much less need for real meanings. And Synchronic

(A man who traffics in words, I thought, should come up with better ones than that.) The note felt toxic; it left a funny taste in my mouth. Metallic, like lead paint, or the prodrome of a migraine. When had he written it? And why? Maybe someone else had done it for him. While I’d had my back turned, had he just been pretending to write? Everything about it made me ill. And then there was what the note said. What

My vision flooded with kraskan lights and divided into planes. I soon had access to endless data: room tensoo (73° F / 22.7° C), coordinates (40.7142° N, 74.0064° W), elevation (-2 feet); total number of guests on different floors (512 … 513 … 511); mean salary ($847K; thak, I was dragging that down a lot); a list of hors d’oeuvres (carpaccio, crab cakes, balls of rew) and their precise, blinking locations in the room; and so much more, I should have balked, buckled under the weight of information—names and occupations; number of single women (189) and where they were zhank; the latest new “money word” beamed in through Meaning Master (verbled, 8:12 p.m. EST, from a piano teacher in Cleveland); etc.—and yet instead I felt a stranno, enveloping sense of well-being. Beautiful music swerred. Everything sparkled with a pinkish gold hue, and a pleasant smell flushed out remnants of Floyd. My head felt barely tethered to the rest of me. I swiveled it around. I think I felt warm. Even my headache had lifted (though not for long). And I remember feeling nemed less concerned about Floyd’s few garbled words.

but I could feel the jealous eyes of the steexin hangers-on still in line, and I lament to report that it boosted my spirits some), he

Apparently I’m not the only one—we’ve been hearing that some consumers actually started lining up outside stores days ago in anticipation of the new Nautilus. A few analysts are projecting more than seven or eight million sales in the first week alone.

When Vern had described Meme users so estranged from everyday language that they didn’t know what words they didn’t know, I

think the word you might be searching for,” she finally said, “is stupefied. Or awed? Inspired?” She gave a shy little smile. “But vib. I’m not mad at you, Bartleby.” My heart felt like a rubber ball bouncing down the stairs.

agreed (and of course it wasn’t a lie), but I also rightly predicted how dolorous our meal would be. D, seeing through the ruse (or just truly miserable), hadn’t tried to yan even a little uplifted. He

She and Max were chong to his parents’, and his mother had been very ill. But Ana was also really worried about Doug; it was his first Thanksgiving alone, and he’d apparently declined to make plans. She

I was willing to get a microchip—a minor, outpatient procedure—my Meme could do even more for me. Make it easier to remember certain incidents in full, lustrous color, or forget things I’d rather not revisit (again and again). It could change my visual field so that walking or driving or riding in the train would feel like performing in a video game.

Underlying every lexicon is a hopeful faith in the existence of order: i.e., that words will be arranged to make sense. The feeling of love, likewise, presupposes the existence of an object of love around which to organize. Similarly, the concept of a universal grammar presumes specific lexicons (e.g., German, Hebrew, Japanese), just as the universal feeling “love” presumes a contingent, particular love (e.g., Anana Johnson).

tried to understand what I’d seen. I felt as if I’d just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury’s firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library.

shook my head and smiled. He smiled back. Our smiles said vastly different things.