Square horses cook lucidly

When I talk to Americans about living in Australia, they want to know about the biggest differences. The biggest differences, though, are subtle differences: the small ways you show up and interact with the world until you realize you take a different shape, behave differently, than you did back home.

I have a sense of myself in Australia operating with syntax but not semantics. Syntax is structure; semantics is meaning. You can produce syntactic language structures, Mad Libs-style, without processing semantic meaning as long as you know your parts of speech. “The square horses cook lucidly” is a syntactically correct sentence because the various parts of speech are in an acceptable order, but it doesn’t make sense semantically. What would that even mean?

But if you sub out the parts of speech, you can see it’s grammatically sound:

Moving to a country that speaks your first language, you expect to be easily and innately understood. I know how English works on a structural level, but I also often feel, when I’m talking to an Australian,* like both parties are experiencing a simultaneous lag in understanding. I laugh at things that aren’t meant to be funny, and I miss the joke when I’m meant to laugh. There are ways of speaking that only work if there is a mutually assumed “getting-it-ness.” If we’ve been having a lively conversation and you launch into a seemingly unrelated anecdote, I will, if I think highly of your conversational skills, wait for you to explain the anecdote’s relevance, to tie everything back together with nuance and panache. If I don’t presume you know what you’re doing, I will think you’ve run away with the conversation. A good conversationalist needs to understand, but they also need to be understood. Semantics is in the ear of the belistener.

*Chantal does not count; tysm for always understanding my nonsense ily

Per Chomsky: “True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things.” This is from a New York Times op-ed on ChatGPT. I have mixed feelings on it. He goes on to say LLMs cannot possess true intelligence because “true intelligence is also capable of moral thinking.” I’m not sure I’m convinced by this (or any) definition of intelligence, but I would say that feeling intelligent comes from other people receiving your ideas as insightful. If you have an insightful thought but can’t express it in a way that will be understood, does it make a sound?

I asked my mom about this recently, and she said that when I was a kid, I got frustrated and disappointed when I wasn’t able to articulate my thoughts. I have a vague memory of suffocating under an ever-expanding pile of words as I tried to describe exactly the feeling or concept for which I had no vocabulary.

“You know,” she said, “sometimes, younger siblings are quieter early on because their older siblings take up all the air space. That wasn’t really a concern with you.”

“Wow,” I said. “Was I really annoying?”

“Oh,” she said, “hmm.”

Possibly, this is why I always wanted to be an author. There’s a neediness in wanting expressional power; it implies that you are afraid you will not be understood without great personal effort. It suggests you worry that your thoughts and emotions might be abnormal, might render you unknowable, while all the while you long to be known.

While I am more comfortable than I once was to nod along quietly, a frictionless bystander to conversation, I don’t find the role, like, fun. By contrast, there’s nothing better than finding yourself in a corner at a party speaking to someone who seems to be moving at exactly your speed, in exactly your direction. With such a person, you enter a context in which you are intelligent, regardless of how your intelligence would be scored by an outsider. It’s a kind of conversational acrobatics: when you laugh at all the right moments; when you know every garden path will get you where you mean to go. Is there any sentence in the English language more fulfilling? “I understand completely.”

Currently reading: A book of my very own, for which I do not as of yet possess a Goodreads link. I wish it counted toward my reading goal because I’ve read it 7,000 times already. Watch this space, as the kids say.

Non-urgent thought of the week: I am just UP IN ARMS that googling “eth” gives you a market summary of Ether when what I want, obviously, is the Wikipedia page for the letter ð.

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