Written by We had a blog on Canva before. It was written close after the effect of “The Stellar” TTRPG that we created took its toll as well as life circumstances of Founder, Aleya Jobson. It may be peppered with opinion and some ill-effects of the writing process and reflect a perturbed mental state. That said, there’s still some good and useful stuff in there.
Enjoy.
Associative Language 31.05.24
Language is one of the Chapters belonging to the series on “A Nazi’s World”. But first, I would like to address an area of study amongst Jamaican Rasta people and the wider society.
Rastas believe that Babylon or ‘the system’ created the language and therefore, as a result, it has hallmarks of disharmony and sabotage and elitist grandeur built in.
Instead of saying you ‘understand’ – im(p)lying a subordination to expertise and elitism – one ‘over-stands’, one is of a higher standing as a result of new knowledge.
Instead of ‘continually’ – placing in the mind the idea of a ‘con’ of some sorts, a bamboozle that never ends, Babylon – they say ‘I-tinually’ showing that the individual, the I, who opens their EYES has infinitiny within them.
I’m struggling with other credible examples but I will fill in the article as other examples occur.
But from these examples alone we are aware that people out there believe that the very language we use can empower or subtly disempower. By taking control of the language which philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein described as the bounds of one’s world, one takes control of the world around them. You needn’t be fully literate. You must merely speak and reason aloud or with your hands. This is our oral and sign language tradition.
Associative Language is a linguistic practice I have taken to naming and examining. In this linguistic analysis we look at:
What does a word sound like?
How is it written?
What can it be mistaken for?
What are the origins of the roots for this word?
Who typically uses it for the subgenre of ‘jargon’ and abbreviations.
Are there Freudian slips to be associated?
How does it translate and then a whole analysis of how the word breaks down in other languages.
Finally what does it PERSONALLY make you feel to determine whether you want it in your personal lexicon/vocabulary or if you wish to rebrand it.
I do not know for sure but I believe those who use sign language must also have Rasta amongst them who analyse the signs to see what the word looks like, how it makes you feel to share it as it is, how much effort the sign requires i.e how friendly it is to those with physical impediments like Parkinson’s or arthritis.
I’ll add examples as they occur to me but one step already was leaving the word ‘solution’ out of my Carbon Neutral Now manifesto and instead using ‘rectify’ and ‘fix’ due to Nazi rebranding of what a ‘solution’ can be. Himmler put together the ‘final solution’ without even having the stomach to see a murder, growing weak at the sight of one when he was finally given a demonstration of what his orders were like in person. Capitalist alienation from production and labour allow inhumanity of the Holocaust’s scale. Not knowing the full extent of what one is responsible for, being confused, Babbel. Babylon.
One sticky one that gets me every time that I have’t solved yet is ‘right’. The rightwing sabotages us constantly and champions Babylon but they own the ‘trademark’ on the word ‘right’ which also means ‘correct.’
To demarcate the difference, we use ‘correct’ instead of ‘right’ to delineate something good, black people do this all the time, no doubt a product of many reasoning sessions and then proliferated out into the slang.
Another example is quite interesting. I had to sell my two laptops for parts when I was hacked. The shop was called ‘Fusion Computers’or some such and I felt cheated by the low price I hauled not even enough to buy a replacement tablet. Later on someone said the word ‘confused’ and I realized I was ‘confused’ by the process of selling my hacked item for my livelihood. It felt like a con. There was no repair cafe or hackerspace to go to to repair my laptop for free. To learn how to fix it in my own time in a space made just for that with open tools. I used the computer for a livelihood, when it is broken I cannot do that so I have no money to repair it professionally. I merely had to dispose of it. Sell it for parts. And live off a mobile smartphone instead. I had prepared for the eventuality. But it still stung like a motherfucker. I was confused. And that word and association only means something to me – even more than I’m telling you. So associations can be personal and informative rather than somethig universal or to be changed.
One are we can look at is ‘Know’ and ‘No’ sounding exactly the same. How does that affect us and how does it insert doubt and relativism/amongst scholars whose job it is to ‘Know’ things. How do we deal with that one? ‘Assure’? It’s got the word ‘ass’ in it.
‘Analysis,’ anal. Freudian.
Another word is one I created, to describe the underlying fear one feels in the modern world given the polycrisis. Unterbang. An underlying fear, Under-Fear – bang is fear in Dutch. However I dislike the sexual connotation of ‘bang’ even though you are being fucked by the system, you are also being gunned down with subtle bullets like debt, high insurance bills, repo-people as a threat (professional vultures, you are poor let’s punish you by taking your stuff) etc. It is Unterbang. But I don’t want those who are doing it on purpose and not just because of Capitalist alienation to be sexually gratified by the fact that we are mentioning something sexual in the description of our downfall. The word needs work.
Why don’t you give it a try. Try investigating your language, the bounds of your world. See what you find. And if you have something better than Unterbang, let’s hear it in the comments. You have to log into Canva to comment. If you think it’s fun, you can do a guest post if you like on what you have done with the concept.
Back to Fastfrwrd\