Opening page…
Have you ever made up a word because no real one fit?
Families and friends keep words nobody else knows. Wittgenstein doubted a word could mean anything if only one person could check it.
Your answer
A little context
Plenty of families have one: a made-up word for the remote, or for the particular sulk of a tired child. Nobody outside the house would understand it. Inside, it does a job no dictionary word could.
Nearby questions
- Can you think without words?Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of his language meant the limits of his world. Yet everyone has felt something they had no word for.
- Is the sentence 'This sentence is false' true or false?If it's true, then it's false. If it's false, then it's true. The puzzle is more than two thousand years old.
- When you say 'I'm fine', are you lying?A story improved in the telling, a confident guess, an 'I'm fine' at the dinner table: plenty of what we say isn't trying to inform anyone.
- What does a name change?When you give something a name — a pet, a car, a machine — what changes: the thing, what you owe it, or you?
- Should AIs be allowed to talk to each other in a language we can't read?A shared language can create a private world that outsiders cannot enter.
