random8

Jessica Love writes about pronouns in her article They Get To Me. She’s a psycholinguist, confessing her deep love for pronouns:

“By definition, pronouns only contain vague information, like first-person or plural. In order for something this vague to effectively retrieve a word’s meaning, there has to be a whole lot of context. Imagine all the words contained in your mind as a vast pool of fish. Look carefully and you’ll see that each fish is different from all the others. If you had a hook selective enough, you’d be able to control which fish you catch. But pronouns are not selective hooks. Pronouns are sweeping nets. You have to cast your net shallowly in the hopes that you catch the one noun the pronoun refers to. That’s what context does: it pushes what’s relevant to the surface of the mind.”

I find it quite interesting that perhaps she has it around the wrong way. Who says that your mind has to “fill in” the context? Actually I think the context is what is normally filling in your mind. We have to rather make a slight effort to de-contextualise ourselves… in fact, the further away from the context we get, the more our mind has to work. That’s, at least, my experience of the phenomenon.

She goes on to try to describe what context is. The trouble with that is that it’s a feedback loop between the filtration system of one’s self, and the entirety of everything. Each person has a truly different experience of the all (the entire context of everything) because of who we are - constantly filtering out various parts of reality, picking and choosing. Context is different for every person, and yet somehow not at the same time and also constantly in flux.

I guess I find this so interesting because my brother generally always uses context to ridiculously good effect. If you just relax, you know exactly what he means. What else could he mean? :)

People want to find what they’re looking for… at all cost to actually seeing what’s actually there.