“Quantum entanglement” / “quantitative easing” Can we think of a substitute to writing that will allow us to coin these phrases (which in turn sit on a stack of coined sequences of syllables) and make them stick? Speech can communicate writing in its entirety. But in committing to paper, we take these fleeting streams (sequences) of thoughts and sounds, let them live outside our limited working memories, and allow for new meanings and ideas to emerge and breathe and survive. With far greater likelihood and frequency than speech alone. Fascinating to think about what invention might make writing obsolete. Will have to be something that allows for effortless creation and storage of new sequences of old ideas…
IMO, the need to express new ideas by combining or redefining old words is a bug in natural language, rather than a feature. It makes communication less precise and that imprecision is prone to gamesmanship.
An example is the attempt by some, in the US, to redefine the meaning of “equality” in the context of our political system, from the traditional “equality under the law” to “equality of outcome”. This sort of persuasion by redefinition, in which you take a word attached to a popular idea and hijack/redirect it to your pet idea, is a Jedi-mind-trick which is enabled by the ambiguity of natural language.
A more rational system of communication, in which distinct ideas were represented by distinct, immutable symbols, rather than combinations/reuses of old symbols, would make for vastly superior communication—-if we could wrap our brains around such a thing!
