writer's block

paradox of choice

this morning i sat on muni on the way to a clinic, and then i sat on bart on the way to work. this evening i sat on bart on the way back home.

only now that i’m home are there words on this screen.

and yes, for those of you that are counting, that’s almost 2 hours of staring at an empty page. it doesn’t bode well for this experiment in not-journaling.

surely i can blame the words at my disposal. i’ve spent a lot of time around internationals, and the one thing they all say is that english is a very limiting language. it lacks richness. how can you express yourself with so few words?

snow

i still remember from my mcat days a theory which might have originated from noam chomsky. that is, inuit ^{_{(if that’s still pc)}} languages have more words for snow than english does. and, as a result, they can perceive more types of it.

it sounded good at the time (and would have served this narrative well), but as i’ve just learned, this may actually be complete fabrication, driven by 1) the fact that there are actually 8 languages in this language family, and 2) each one is highly polysynthetic.

but while we’re on the topic of cold countries…

много слов

the girl that i knew to express herself the most was russian. and she would complain about english relentlessly.

but here’s the kicker: the english dictionary (~600k words) is around 3x larger than the russian one. so it’s clearly not true that our options are limited.

however, only around 10k words are necessary for fluency in either language (this estimate varies wildly).

indeed, as a percentage, this would imply that only 1.6% of english language is actively used, while that figure is about 5% for the russian language¹. so, although we have access to plenty of words, we just don’t tap into this depth.

de la lengua

now, the figure above is more illustrative than authoritative. it’s certainly true that one reason why english has so many words is because we just steal them from other languages. however, my point is this: the words are there if you’re willing to search for them.

there is no topic, paragraph structure, or word choice which is established. set. fixed. determined. arranged. settled. laid. insisted. decided. appointed. or even entrenched.

but today, i just cannot find the words for which i’m searching.