Language Is Made of Rubber

books language quote

GEB turns 40 this year. Seven hundred and seventy-seven pages about how meaning works. And one of my favorites is about how it shouldn't. Language is magic.

The amazing thing about language is how imprecisely we use it and still manage to get away with it. People use words in a "spongy" or "rubbery" or even "Nutty-Puttyish" way. If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut; they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.