1.1 Language always refers to something outside of itself.
1.2 This referent is a different thing to the word.
-Apologies for the numbered, bullet pointed, Wittgenstein (via Tolstoy) style listing. It felt like the easiest way to do it.
-My keyboard's space bar is partially broken, if I don't push down hard enough I get huge run-on words with no gaps as though I were making a compundGermannoun.
-In the coffee shop (a new franchise in the town where my parents live. Bad coffee, good cakes, staff who are happy to have a job), I explained all this, and she said, 'Maybe that's why language is ironic, because objects are.' and that is a better explanation than everything else you'll read here.
2 Language is essentially ironic.
2.1 Its essence is to have no meaning in itself.
2.1.1 Or, its in itself meaning is veiled behind its referential meaning, which exists outside of language, in the things it refers to.
2.1.2 Also, it does not mean anything to itself. Its referential meaning, that which we (as its users) regard as it's real or functional meaning is lost to the words themselves. They do not experience themselves as ironic.
-But writing this stuff down is hard, I feel fuzzy today. When do I not feel fuzzy? Apparently mathematicians peak in their late twenties. I'm not a mathematician, but I'm in my late twenties! Am I peaking? Is this what peaking feels like?
-That's why I am writing in these stupid bullet points, like I can somehow enforce order on my thoughts.
-My thoughts, which move faster than I can write, thoughts which move faster than I can put them together, thoughts which move faster than I can think.
-Thoughts which by their nature don't let me me think, are muddled between thoughts and thoughts about those thoughts; thoughts about things here and things away from here; things real and unreal; things concrete and infinite.
3 Language is hidden from itself
3.1 To talk about language's meaning is to already assume that language has meaning.
3.2 Language doesn't have the tools to analyse itself.
(3.3 In fact, everyday language often doesn't have the tools to analyse lots of things.
3.1.1 Which is why technical languages spring up where everyday language fails.
3.1.2 We could say here that when everyday language fails, it falls back and becomes only itself, its meaning fails to refer to the thing we wish to describe.)
-I told you it was easier if we just left it with what she said in the overpriced coffee shop in the town where my parents live.
-All I really wanted to write is that I have been thinking about how language is always ironic, and how Object Oriented Ontology talks about objects as being removed from one other, and their essential characteristic as being more than the characteristics that can be experienced by other objects, and then I said this to her and she said, 'Maybe that's why language is ironic, because objects are.'
