My friend Sonya asked on Twitter recently how many disciplines required practice as well as teaching

My friend Sonya asked on Twitter recently how many disciplines required practice as well as teaching and study to master, and it quickly became clear that the answer is: all of them. This might seem obvious, but the implications of the answers to this question are profound once you play it out, in my opinion.

It hit me that this fact demonstrates how bad language is at communicating subtle knowledge. If you can't transmit the how-to of a given practice, then it illustrates that there is a ton of data that language just can't convey. It doesn't matter if you can't possibly imagine how anything about the tiny subtleties you glean by doing whatever it is you are good at could ever be conveyed in language. That's not the point. The point is that it can't. Yet.

On a related note, I was jogging and listening to a lecture on Nietzsche's writing style by Prof. Kathleen Higgins from "The Great Courses," and she argued that Nietzsche wrote using a lot of diffferent styles because he believed language needed experiments to get it to work better.

It hit me then: language is technology.

So all those people who resist language changing and growing and taking on new forms: they are very bad. They are harmful reactionaries.

It is very easy to be misunderstood in this life. This leads to a lot of needless pain. Language needs to be much better, and it's still very early for language. It is very rough technology. Every tongue in the world is a bad beta test. We should really encourage all kinds of forays into new realms for transmitting meaning between two brains.

Language is very much unfinished software. Keep forking words and grammar, everybody.