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The word you don't know
A word you don't know, halfway down the page. What do you actually do?
Stopping, guessing, skipping and asking each assume something different about where a word's meaning lives.
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A little context
Halfway down the page of a novel you meet crepuscular, or a word in a contract you only think you know. Your eyes slow. Whatever you do next, you have probably done it a hundred times before, without noticing that it was a choice.
Nearby questions
- 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.
- 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?
