Yeah, you wouldn’t be alone there. I think it’s the opposite of muddled, it is being precise; the words are chosen very carefully! They’re chosen to try and convey very specific meanings. And everyone does this, my own choice of “wordplay” is meant to evoke meaning for specific reasons to convey what I was trying to, to specifically acknowledge that some folks feel the way you do. Heck, the parent chose “lingua franca,” which is not from English, to convey the specific meaning evoked from that phrase’s time and space!
In the end, talking about talking is hard (oh no there I go accidentally elevating speech above writing again), but not everyone is interested in everything or every methodology. We’re all trying to figure it out in our own ways.
It's part of the reason I went into philosophy via linguistics, and feel like I came out the other side. I feel like philosophy has been too influenced by talking about talking. It's the most accessible way to address thought, but the most misleading.
I'm pouring more energy into the thinking that occurs without talking. I hope it can capture some of the things that we hope to capture with shades of meaning, but without the disagreements about dictionaries.
Unfortunately it's leading me through some of the paths trodden by behaviorists, and that's a minefield of its own.
It's part of the reason I went into philosophy via linguistics...
Have you read any George Lakoff? I took a course from him at Berkeley. That’s the closest I’ve personally gotten to philosophy. Just curious if you have any thoughts about his approach.
Lakoff's work is incredibly important, and his work on the way language shapes our public discourse has been very prescient. A lot of what's going on right now is well understood through Lakoff's lens.
I think that his work on cognitive linguistics is incredibly insightful, but potentially (ahem) dangerous. Language illustrates the mind, but I've come to believe that the ability of semantics to get us over the bridge between speech and cognition is limited. We certainly do use metaphors to frame our thinking, but I think that's building on top of a non-verbal cognitive system that the verbal system coopts. Coopts so thoroughly it's easy to be misled into thinking that's all of it.
That's not what Lakoff is doing, of course. He's largely going the other direction, to show how language manipulates us. Very important stuff. Just less epistemological than I used to believe.
In the end, talking about talking is hard (oh no there I go accidentally elevating speech above writing again), but not everyone is interested in everything or every methodology. We’re all trying to figure it out in our own ways.