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As children grow, the values and perceptions of the world are shaped by their experiences and the adults in their communities. Words begin to take on certain nuanced meanings and connotations. As we saw in our discussion of anarchy (and countless discussions that preceded it), sometimes, the meaning of words change, their definitions are not clear, or they become corrupted.
How does language shape the way we see the world? What ideas are we more or less able to access, hold, and develop because limitations of the languages we speak? What is the value — and the limits — of having a robust vocabulary, and developing shared, nuanced definitions of words? Somewhere around 20% of the world’s population speaks English? How might this expand or constrain the diversity of concepts that can be communicated? As Rowen White has said: “If we are bound by the constraints of language and lexicon, how is modern culture really going to shift in the powerful and positive ways it needs to to restore our collective spiritual power.”
How can we can communicate ideas that we haven’t even imagined yet? Can we make up our own words? Should we? And if we do, how do we do we define and translate them so that we can continue to communicate across differences and with newcomers?
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