 Knock, knock. Who's there? Two. To who? To whom? Okay, first things first, viewer Tanya sent me a freaking shuriken from Japan. That's going right there. Today, I'm going to show you how to control other people's minds. In fact, I'm controlling your mind right now! Mwahaha! Put the tinfoil hats away, they're not going to help this time. Let me explain how this works. First, my brain puts together a thought. Maybe this hat is gray. It doesn't use any words to think that. Just thought blobs of hatness and grayness. It then matches those thought blobs to sounds in a massive and intricate database. Like, when I see this sort of thing that's perfectly suited for sitting on top of a head, that thing is represented by the sound hat. I do that for all those wordless thought blobs, and then to control your mind, I just make the sounds this hat is gray. When you hear those noises, your brain looks them up in its own personal database, and then this is where the magic happens. It makes those ideas. Like, you might not have seen the hat that I'm talking about before. You might not have even seen a gray hat before. But the thought blobs in your brain bear a remarkable resemblance to the thought blobs that I originally had. Think about that for a second. I am making thoughts in your head with sounds. Like I said, mind control. Okay, so it's not forcing people to do your evil bidding, but it's still really cool. We're basically conditioned for it since birth, and our lives are saturated in it, but as popular as language is, it still has some problems. I'm going to talk about four of them. First, that personal database of words and thoughts that I was talking about is actually very different from person to person. In order for you to build a relationship between a word and an idea, somebody has to point at something in the world and give that thing a name. And what they point at varies a lot between people. When I say hat, if you were raised in Dallas, you might think of something like this. If you were raised in Boston, maybe something like this. Two very different things, same word. Yes, you could clarify by saying a cowboy hat, a 10 gallon cowboy hat, a 10 gallon felted cowboy hat with 3 eighths inch black ribbon, you get the picture. But no matter how much work you do, you can't make somebody else's mental picture look exactly like the one that you have in your head, because every word that you use to clarify what you're thinking has the hat problem. You're using imperfectly defined words to define imperfectly defined words, which leaves me to problem number two. There is no authority ensuring universal definitions for words. But Josh, I have a dictionary. Mmm, I hate to break it to you, but the dictionary is an observation, not an authority. For example, a lot of people were outraged that the word literally got a second definition in dictionaries because people were misusing it. But if that's the way that people were using the word, that's what the dictionary should say. And if you're still outraged, just reflect for a second that the very first sentence dictionary published in 1604 was titled A Table Alphabetical. And yes, it was spelled that way. Why? How would you spell it, you dirty prescriptivist? There isn't any massive chiseled obelisk anywhere that has the true meaning of words. Words mean whatever people think they mean, and the dictionary just lists the most common usage of those words. Which leaves me to problem number three. How well you use language is engaged by how closely you adhere to the dictionary or the handbook of style, although a lot of people think that it is. It's measured by your effectiveness in creating the thoughts that you intended to create in your audience, and that requires knowing your audience and their database. Like if you were trying to tell a five-year-old not to touch a hot stove, you wouldn't say, does this from your self-injurious activity because that would utterly fail to create any meaningful thoughts in a five-year-old's brain that would prevent them from doing what they were doing. And as such, you would have failed at communicating. This is also why things like diplomacy and tact are useful. You don't just fail at communicating if you can't make ideas in your audience. You also fail if you make the wrong ideas, and not considering how your intonation and your word selection and your body language is going to affect what you're trying to say is a great way to convey the wrong ideas. For example, if you use a lot of curse words in everyday speech and your audience is a bunch of people who don't use curse words unless they're really upset, unless you watch your language, you're going to convey the idea that you're really upset. And that's going to f**k up your entire f**king f**k. A lot of people act like they should just be able to say whatever they're thinking and not have to worry about tact because, hey, they didn't mean to offend anybody. Those people don't realize that their audience's interpretation of their intended meaning is just as important as what they were actually trying to say. At least it does if they want to actually communicate with other people. I mean, I guess they don't have to be tactful in their journal. This brings me to problem number four. Language is invasive. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but unless the situation is really bad, you're probably not going to get into your brain. When we hear words or read them, we don't have any mechanism in place to stop the thoughts that they encode from happening. They just happen, which is a problem because words absolutely have the capacity to hurt people. If you've ever listened to a graphic description of something that's really gross and felt a little, ah, ah, ah, you've felt what words can do and short of sticking your fingers in your ears and going, la, la, la, la, you've been powerless to stop it. That's because some of the ideas referenced in your mental database are feelings of discomfort and pain and anguish and even nausea. And if you can guess that a sequence of words is going to cause those ideas in someone else, saying them isn't that far removed from physically assaulting that person. One causes pain by damaging their body. The other causes pain by directly referencing the sensation in their brain. I'm not saying that you can do the benedicerate word paralysis thing, but you really can hurt somebody with words. Because words are little programs that people's brains execute without their consent. And wielding that sort of power comes with a lot of responsibility. Have you ever experienced a failure of language? How do you feel about including lol in the dictionary? Leave comments, let me know what you think. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.