An attempt to hit the mark.

Language is interesting. How we describe something’s nature, transfer ideas, and create meaning is all done through our words.

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

Terrence Mckenna

Just as much as our words create our world, our world shapes our words.

For example, we say “the fruits of my labor,” describing the consequences of one’s actions, but in a way inspired by our observations of the world around us.

Now, we find this same process in the “roots” of our words. At some point in time, the vibrations and mumbles that leave our mouths happened. And that likely happened in a manner that had to do with what we were doing – mostly farming, hunting, sailing, baking, etc.

Etymology Nerd has some great examples of this process – check out the origins of Blogs and the iPod.

The point is hard

I attended an academic talk by Jordan Peterson, who is currently on a tour describing his interpretations of biblical stories.

He did a deep-dive into a major concept in the Bible,“sin,” which is a word in English that refers to “missing the mark,” inspired by the idea of an archer, arrow, and target.

And during his talk, Peterson said something along the lines of “of course it’s hard, that’s the point.” We translate that phrase in this context as “the difficulty is purposeful.”

However, if you were to describe an arrow’s tip, you could look at it and say “of course it’s hard, that’s the point.” In this context, it is simply a literal descriptor of the topographical feature of the arrow.

The question then becomes…

Which came first? The purpose of the difficulty? Or the hardness of the point?

We could say there is something about the arrow that reflects the nature of our reality. There is something about points that are intrinsically hard. Like a period. PERIOD. That’s why it makes sense to us.

Or, are points hard because we’ve created them that way? Like how the person created the arrow with a hard point because it would accomplish the task at hand.

Speaking of hard things

I feel like I’ve missed the mark. Trying to write about this is hard. Yes, I know that’s the point. But I need a break, and may come back to this idea later.