SchindlersWord

the origin of humanity

humanity human

Word is great, beautiful, and oh so fascinating

Word is great, beautiful, and oh so fascinating that some readers might expect it to be true.

Well, word is even greater, beautifuller, and fascinatinger than that.

Among the fascinating features of words is that’s what you’re looking at since this article began to the end, from its headline to its takeaway, and of course everything in between — nothing but words.

You can see them but you cannot touch ’em

As you read on, should you mistake my use of words to contain any truths, relax, it‘s a common mistake that happens in the best of families.

There are no truths here to be found.

The only thing you’ll find here are words.

More than a thousand in fact.

What you do with them is all up to you.

You’re in control.

Truth

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

If despite this you believe what’s told at kindergartens, schools, and universities, that means you’re among the many who believe in a beginning without an end.

That means you believe in the beginning is a big bang, a fictional character, or a mystery.

Though a beginning without an end is impossible, you won’t be arrested by the police. On the contrary, it only means that like the police you’re part of the majority.

Only if you’re part of the minority do you practice active noticing of what’s going on within you and without you.

Only a minority of word-users know how within you and without you began.

In the beginning is the word

That in the beginning is the word can be denied only by confirming it.

In other words, you cannot deny a word without using it.

But even so, a question remains for those of you who find it hard to believe in a beginning you may not have heard about or thought of previously.

“In the beginning of what?”

Naturally, the answer is “In the beginning of everything you have a word for.”

Other than that?

Other than in the beginning of everything we have a word for, what else is word?

Before you can even begin to understand word, there are two steps you might find hard to take.

  • Accept there is a difference between what word is, what word does, and what word has.
  • Accept there’s no difference between word and words.

In singular and plural they is/are, does/do, and has/have the identical.

When you accept that word and words are the same, you then also understand that how one word works is how all words work.

You are naturally free to not accept the two steps most word-users find hard to take, if at the same time you also accept that you won’t understand word and words in exchange.

You may even ask why which words allow given that why is among them.

One step at a time: Words ARE

Words are the latest in the chain of inventions made by the four elements — fire, wind, earth, and water — that also invented the planet, the cells, the plants, the animals, the eyes and the brains, before they proceded to also invent the words and us, the word-users.

I hear you.

“If so, how can the word be in the beginning?”

The word is in the beginning of words, also known as in the beginning of the After Words, and in the end of wordless, also known as in the end of the Before Words.

Put differently, the word is in the beginning of everything you know.

Everything you know

You know beginning because you know what beginning describes.
You know Mount Everest because you know what Mount Everest describes.
You know screw because you know what screw describes.
You know driver because you know what driver describes.
You know tool because you know what tool describes.

And so it is with everything you know.

What else?

Maybe the fact that the word is in the beginning (of everything you have a word for) doesn’t answer every question you might have about words.

Perhaps one more question remains at the back of what many word-users consider the back of your mind (whatever that is supposed to be).

“What else can you show me?”

Well, In addition to in the beginning, words are a tool.

Like any tool, words can work for you or they can kill you.

But that has got nothing to do with the tool. It all depends on what you do with it.

It’s not the word. It’s the user.

You’re in control.

Keep your word and many decisions are already made

In that sense, the word is no different to your ears, eyes, brains, hands, hair, and feet.

You are in control.

Better act as if, or you will be constantly getting in your own way which will wear you out in the long run.

Or “assume the virtue if you have it not” (William Shakespeare).

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (William Shakespeare)

And so it is with words.

A word by any other name is still a word.

While this applies to each of the “collins.co.uk analytical database with over 4.5 billion words”, it also particularly applies to the ones below.

Able, actual, anecdote, answer, artifact, belief, bible, break, change, chat, comma, communicate, concept, conspire, consult, context, contrast, contranym, convention, converse, conversation, correspond, co-respond, data, dictionary, discussion, encyclopedia, epic, fables, fake, frame, god, gossip, grammar, grammatic, grapheme, graphic, high, history, hyphen, I (capitalized 750 years ago to mark it as a word), information, intelligence, internet, isolation, james bond, jargon, key, knowledge, label, language, legend, letter, lie, life, linguistic, literally, me, meme, meaning, metaphor, morpheme, name, narrative, news, normal, note, objective, ortho, para, parable, paragraph, parser, period, phoneme, phonetic, phonologic, phrase, play, practic, private, public, secondary, sequence, speech, spoken, question, quote, really, reality, report, response, saga, school, sentence, silence, stimulus, sound, statement, story, symbol, synonym, talk, testament, text, theory, theoretic, thesaurus, thing, think, thought, truth, understand, unique, universe, university, uttered, value, verb, verse, vocabulary, wisdom, wise, wordless, work, world, worm, worry, worth, write, yarn, and you, to name a few.

Words are not

To see what words are not, click https://tinyurl.com/ytasu8cf

More

More about words — what words do and what words have — will be topics of upcoming posts.

In the meantime, if you have any clues, ideas or insights, please let me know.

Thank you in advance!

Takeaway

2 free flip-books of quotes worth reading twice selected for you by SchindlersWord for you to keep

https://tinyurl.com/3vpxsr9d
https://tinyurl.com/4dc9y8by

Words are not

Words are not what the world-wide-web, the internet, and the smart phones are telling you

Here are a few examples of many

Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia & world’s most-read reference work with 2.5 billion unique visitors a month)

“Word: Part of a series on Linguistics, General linguistics, Applied linguistics, Theoretical frameworks. In linguistics, a word of a spoken language can be defined as the smallest sequence of phonemes that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning. In many languages, words also correspond to sequences of graphemes (“letters”) in their standard writing systems that are delimited by spaces wider than the normal inter-letter space, or by other graphical conventions.[1] The concept of “word” is usually distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of word which has a meaning, even if it will not stand on its own together or in other small words. In many languages, the notion of what constitutes a “word” may be learned as part of learning the writing system.[1] This is the case for the English language, and for most languages that are written with alphabets derived from the ancient Latin or Greek alphabets. There still remains no consensus among linguists about the proper definition of “word” in a spoken language that is independent of its writing system, nor about the precise distinction between it and “morpheme”.[1] This issue is particularly debated for Chinese and other languages of East Asia,[2] and may be moot [clarification needed] for Afro-Asiatic languages. In English orthography, the letter sequences “rock”, “god”, “write”, “with”, “the”, “not” are considered to be single-morpheme words, whereas “rocks”, “ungodliness”, “typewriter”, and “cannot” are words composed of two or more morphemes (“rock”+”s”, “un”+”god”+”li”+”ness”, “type”+”writ”+”er”, and “can”+”not”). In English and many other languages, the morphemes that make up a word generally include at least one root (such as “rock”, “god”, “type”, “writ”, “can”, “not”) and possibly some affixes (“-s”, “un-“, “-ly”, “-ness”). Words with more than one root (“[type][writ]er”, “[cow][boy]s”, “[tele][graph]ically”) are called compound words.” Words are combined to form other elements of language, such as phrases (“a red rock”, “put up with”), clauses (“I threw a rock”), and sentences (“I threw a rock, but missed”).”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

“Word: A speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use.”

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary

“Word: A single unit of language that means something and can be spoken or written.”

Etymology Online

“Word: Speech, talk, utterance, sentence, statement, news, report, word.”

Thesaurus

“Word: discussion. Synonyms for word: conversation, talk, chat, chitchat, colloquy, confab, confabulation, consultation, discussion, tête-à-tête.”

ChatGPT

“A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more spoken or written sounds or symbols. It is the basic building block of communication and allows us to convey ideas, thoughts, and emotions.”

Also

Words are not language.

Who mistakes words for language doesn’t know the first thing about eihter

Note

This “Words are not” page has last been updated in October, 2023.

From learning words to habits is faster than you think

By In blog, words

Words become habits faster than you think

Habits rule the conditioned mind.

Hold it!

Relax.

Before you jump to conclusions you only risk to regret later, don’t think that your mind has a choice — it is conditioned whether it likes it or not.

The freedom you have, the only freedom you have, is to decide who does the conditioning.

It’s either other word-users with their companies’ interests in mind, each their own…

…or it’s you.

Use your freedom wisely, for habits eat good intentions for breakfast.

Habits are first cobwebs (the tangled webs produced by spiders) too light to be felt until they fast become chains too heavy to be broken.

Because we’re animals, albeit animals with words, we can never free ourselves from habits. But we can replace bad word habits with good word habits in the blink of an eye.

No habit impacts what do and what we have more than word habits, which are words spoken habitually and repeatedly, out loud or in self-talk don’t make any difference.

Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.

Therefore, what you do and what you have is not an accident. It is a direct consequence of the words you use repeatedly.

Watch your word

Watch your words for the ones you use repeatedly become your habits faster than you think.

Your habits in turn determine what you achieve and what you fail to achieve.

What you achieve in turn becomes your self-image, also known as your self-esteem, which in turn becomes your destiny.

However, in the beginning of this chain of events — of words, habits, achievements, self-image, and destiny — is always the word. The beginning is key. Never let that out of your sight.

Never let how everything began…

In the beginning of you is the word.

…including how you began out of your sight.

Needless to say but for the sake of this post I say it anyway, you is a word.

When you change how you look at words, you, your life, and your world will change.

Somewhere on purpose versus nowhere by accident

Some word-users arrive somewhere on purpose.

Those are the ones that use vision repeatedly.

They have other things going for them as well, but they all have a vision which they either achieve or die trying.

Other word-user decide to arrive nowhere by accident.

These are the ones that don’t watch the words they use repeatedly, including the broken not to be spoken to begin with.

Men’s natures are alike. It is their habits that separates them.” – Confucius

Simple versus complicated

You might think the journey from birth to death is complicated.

I know exactly how it feels because I used to make the same mistake myself.

But when you branch out and take the road less traveled, you’ll discover that it’s simple, and that simple isn’t complicated when you know how.

Some word-users claim it’s simple to be happy but hard to be simple. Those are the ones that simply don’t know how.

I’ve been a simplification coach, and I have helped myself and my clients to simplify their lives, for as long as I remember.

I’ve written a bunch about simple, among others in the “LAST TRAIN TO SIMPLE – The crazy method to love life” — to which the reader reviews are here.

Now, after my latest book, “THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY – What can be denied only by confirming it”, is out, I will soon release my new book on “HOW TO SIMPLIFY” (title yet to be defined. Any suggestions will be much appreciated).

In the beginning is the word

Like THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY, HOW TO SIMPLIFY will be based on what can be denied only by confirming it, that is in the beginning is the word.

HOW TO SIMPLIFY will be based on the fact that when you change how you look at words, you, your life your world, and your destiny will change in the blink of an eye.

Words that don’t serve you are easier to abandon today than tomorrow.

Word habits that serve you versus word habits that harm you aren’t a question of easy or hard. On the contrary, word habits are just that, a question of habit. But word habits good or bad come with BIG consequences because word habits work like compound interest, you get back more than you put in.

The minute you change the bad words for words that serve you well — I’ll help you to figure them out, to each their own — your destiny changes, and when your destiny changes, how you feel changes too, which in turn determines what you go after and what you avoid,,,

…for the rest of your life and a day.

Takeaway

Nothing impacts your destiny more than what you feel now.

Now you can feel good or bad anytime.

Don’t ever let that freedom out of your sight.

Your destiny depends on it.

Do you believe that media would exist without words?

By In blog, words

In the wordless world

Everything you have a word for doesn’t exist in the wordless world for self-evident reasons, including of course media.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world of word-users, word is the medium without which there wouldn’t be any (media).

For completeness’ sake, let me add that it’s not just about media.

There’d be no word-users either.

Breathe and allow things to pass

You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to social media.

Power is sitting back and observing everything with logic.

If social media controls you means everyone with a smart phone can control you.

Breathe and allow things to pass.

How to make your morning productivity explode with one simple tactic

By In blog, words

I was happily pedaling on my bicycle when a T-shirted speedster blew by me on her battery-powered roller.

For a moment, I was dis-appointed.

She’s speedy, I’m not. She’s young, I’m not. What’s the point?

Then I realized, A) that I had failed that morning to appoint myself, B) that it’s not a race, and C) that I don’t own a plan B.

It’s not a race. On the contrary, it’s a journey from the beginning to the end, to each their own, including the lies we’re told with no end in sight.

You’re making choices you’re told by your handheld devices. It’s a lie. There are more choices than any word-user can embrace in a thousand-plus years.

If you got up this new morning to make choices, it might be your turn to be disappointed. You’re too late by a country smile. The choices have been made, it’s not for you to make any.

All the word-users can do is make decisions, each their own, from among the more words than you could manage even if you lived a thousand years which even your best friend will probably doubt.

Decide is all the word-users can do. That’s the only variable in time and space. Everything else has been decided eons ago.

But as you’re breathing, in this eon right now, lucky you are identical to every other word-user, free to believe as you decide, provided you believe it is true.

The beauty of it? No other word or other word-user can believe it for you.

Behind every horizon, there is more to see.

Explode your morning productivity

If you dreamt last night of seeing your morning productivity explode today, waking up was a good first step, highly recommended but not enough.

To make your morning productivity explode with one simple tactic depends on how you’ve been educated.

In other words, it depends on what you believe about words.

If you believe the word is what they want you to believe at kindergarten, school, university, church, and internet, to name a few, you will never know the first thing about the word nor about the beginning.

Everybody has heard about that in the beginning is the word, but only a few word-users know what it means.

Education

Kindergarten, school, university, church, and internet, to name a few, are all about education, and “anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either” (Marshall McLuhan).

People ask me, Beat, what do you believe we should change about education? How do you think we could improve schools to celebrate and uplift the children and our specie as a whole?

I think and know I’m not the only one, that the system is broken, that it’s been broken since it’s been invented by word-masters thousands of years ago, and that more of the same will be just that, more broken.

Getting our young together, getting them outdoors, getting them to play, getting them to create, and getting them to decide on their own, is important. But all animals do this, and more, naturally.

We, the animal with words, as opposed to every other species on Earth, are the only specie that builds schools for the sole purpose of words.

And anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and school doesn’t know the first thing about either.

All elements, plants, and animals learn

All elements, plants, and animals learn to decide and to move on their own, but they do it without schools. Most of them do it even without brains, but that’s a different story altogether.

I think that’s what education is about, and that schools all over the world should be made to remember that’s what they’re about.

Sure, what I believe is a new method to belief that makes the old obsolete, which is why it’s hard to embrace for many readers.

But hard doesn’t make it impossible.

Though it’s hard to believe, you are playing with the idea as we speak anyway, aren’t you?

Back to making your morning productivity explode with one simple tactic.

If you don’t know how, that’s how it’s done:

Don’t go with what they want you to believe about words at kindergarten, school, university, church, and internet, to name a few. Instead, embrace what can be denied only by confirming it:

In the beginning is the word

From words, worlds are born.
Words work.
Decide your words well.
“Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself.” – Patrick Rothfuss
“What a word means, a sentence cannot say.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Words are a prison, but even a prison is a home if you have the key (the key is in THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY for everybody to see).
Everything word-users have a word for is a word.
Everything word-users know is a word.
Words are what word-users respond to.
Words are how word-users aim at what they’re looking for.
A word is in the beginning of everything the word-users have a word for, you included.
The appearance of words has revolutionized evolution.
Words have not only changed everything word-users have a word for, they create it.
Words are a gift we’re meant to keep.
Words don’t describe the world, they merely describe how the word-users see it.
Words have not only changed what the word-users see, but how they see.
Words are the limits of the word-users world.
Once you see that, they cease to be the limits of your world.
Words are not taught at school.
The story of words is not told, neither at school nor anywhere else.
Word-masters have known that in the beginning is the word since the beginning of words.
Word-users love to use their words.
Words tend to get mistaken for evidence, and the word-users often treat them that way.
If you have a word for it, it’s a word.
If you ignore what words can do to you, then you can have no empathy for what words can do to other word-users.
Words do not matter (they possess zero electric charge).
Words have no meaning.
Words don’t make sense.
The one with the matter, meaning, and senses, the sensational one, is you.
A word, any word, can be denied only by confirming it.
Words defy our understanding of how the universe works.
Words couldn’t be anything else if they tried.
For self-evident reasons.
Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.

There’s nothing so stable as change

I think the days are coming when things are changing on planet Earth.

I think we are awakening, and word-users are asking the same exact question, and answering it as well.

So much to be excited about for future generations on planet Earth and our species.

To make you MASSIVELY stand out from the crowd, do the opposite of what most people do.

By In blog, you

Have you seen Oppenheimer, the movie?

It’s possible you’ve read the book. Who knows, maybe you did both.

To make your view of the world MASSIVELY stand out from the crowd, is easy to do.

Do the opposite of what the crowd does.

The majority of word-users read the book or watch the movie thinking Oppenheimer is about the atomic bomb.

To MASSIVELY stand out from the crowd, dig just a little bit deeper.

When you do, you’ll see that Oppenheimer is about more than just the atom bomb.

You’ll see that Oppenheimer is — for lack of a better word — about insanity.

Don’t let me be misunderstood.

It’s neither for me nor for anybody else to tell you what to do and what not to do on your journey.

All I’m saying is that the choices exist — you can conform or stand out any time you want — that the decision is yours, and that no other word or word-user can decide it for you.

Oppenheimer is more than about the bomb

To build an atomic bomb takes words and word-users.

How can you know beyond the shadow of a doubt?

Nothing wordless has ever built an atomic bomb.

The wordless sun hasn’t, nor has the wordless moon, stars, stardust, fire, air, earth, cells, plants, animals, eyes, and brains.

To build an atomic bomb took animals with words, of which Oppenheimer is part.

In other words, that’s what Oppenheimer is also about.

It took words to build the atomic bomb.

And it took yet more words to get us into the state the world is in, which is where you and I are waging a war against nature, a war against you and me.

If we win, we’re guaranteed to lose.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Have I mentioned insanity?

A new model that makes the old obsolete

If we don’t embrace soon a new model that makes the old model obsolete, it’ll be the end of us.

More and more word-users are ready to bet their life on it, which like for the atomic bomb, cannot be done without words. The proof is in the pudding. The wordless don’t do it.

Not that it matters, after all, words also don’t matter.

And though it’s not taught at school, everybody knows that all will be good in the end, and that if not all is good, it means that it’s not the end yet.

Talking of which…

Even should it one day be the end for us, it won’t be the end for all things wordless. On the contrary, the wordless on our planet will be happy to see the end of the words and the word-users once again.

The only difference shall be that we and our children will no be longer present to see it.

Words have revolutionized evolution

Oppenheimer is also about the fact that in the most recent 0.0003% of Earth-Time that they have been around, the word and the word-users have revolutionized evolution.

Before Words

In the first 99.9997% of the 4.65 billion years since the wordless fire, air, earth, and water arrived from outer space by space travel to invent our planet, you could say that the few things that happened over those 4.65 billion years happened slowly.

Based on the numbers above, you could say they took forever.

After Words

In the remaining 0.0003% of the 4.65 billion years of Earth-Time, the word and the word-users have been invented…

  • 3/1000th of a second before midnight
  • When the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet
  • 13,750 years ago.

And now, 13,750 years later, there are 4 billion words in English alone.

That means since the invention of presumably the first word 13,750 years ago, the word-users have invented 290,909 additional words in each of those 13,750 years. Imagine that!

With no end in sight. Imagine that!

Everything you know is a word

Though it’s hard to believe and it’s not taught at school, everybody understands that everything we know is a word.

Yet some word-users want you to believe that it’s possible to know 4 billion of them, which includes truth and world, to name a few.

Truth

To each word-user their own truth.

Let alone a different word for true depending on location.

World

As for truth above, world too means different things to different word-users. Let alone a different word for world depending on location.

If even truth and world, just 2 words of 4 billion, mean different things to different people at different times, this makes you wonder about the purpose of evolution, the purpose of intelligence, the purpose of words, and the purpose of the atomic bombs, does it not?

If not, do you wonder about anything at all?

No question about it

No question about it, the invention of words has allowed us to get to the top of the food chain, with the word-users life expectancies 10 times longer than they used to be, and now ready for breakfast on Mars.

But what’s the purpose of all of these and other accomplishments if they only serve us to describe the state of the world in these terms:

If we don’t end the war against ourselves, it’ll be the end of us.

Words have revolutionized evolution before.

I’m not saying they can do it again. All I’m saying is let’s give words a chance.

To do again what they did 13,750 years ago.

Revolutionize evolution.

If your words don’t have rules, you’re doing it wrong

By In blog, words, you

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, everything you have a word for doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons, including word for equally self-evident reasons.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world, everybody knows that everything is different because everything we know is what we have words for.

But that’s not all.

What everybody doesn’t know is that words have rules the grammarians don’t have a clue about.

With grammar taught at schools throughout the world means the 7 word rules below are ignored by both the grammarians and the other word-users throughout the world, too.

Word rules

.

#1: Words do not matter

See https://tinyurl.com/3sdy9fcn

#2: If you have a word for it, it’s a word.

See http://tinyurl.com/y9w5msd7

#3: Words are always yours

When you speak a word, any word — whether in self-talk or aloud — it will be yours always for nobody else can think it or speak it for you.

#4: A word can be denied only by confirming it.

If you want to deny a word, any word, you’ll discover in the blink of an eye that it cannot be done without using it.

#5: Words are how word-users aim at what they’re looking for.

Whenever word-users are looking for anything — such as heartbreak, success, happiness, more, time, problem, solution, agreement, direction, or decision, to name a select few of the 4 billion English words on offer, you’re sure to use those words.

#6: Words are the limits of your world.

Words are a prison, but even a prison is a home if you have the key.
PS. If interested, the key is now in THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY for everybody to see.

#7: A word is never another (word).

Examples:

Mistaking words for another (word) is a BIG mistake because it prevents anyone making it from knowing the first thing about either.

To say of two things that they are identical is nonsense. And to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.” – Marshall McLuhan

.

Takeaway

.

If your words don’t have rules, you’re doing it wrong.

Follow the 7 word rules above to see words work for you, as opposed to against you, in no time at all.

What makes a good picture?

By In words, you

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, nothing exists that word-users have a word for.

For self-evident reasons that includes good and picture.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world:

  • Picture is a word
  • Everything you have a word for is a word
  • A word, any word, couldn’t be anything else if it tried
  • Picture is mistaken to speak 1,000 words

This might make sense at first sight — especially the part about picture speaking, which presupposes that words have the organs required (to speak).

But unlike the word-users, words are void of organs.

And if you look a wee bit closer, you can clearly see that the invention of pictures predates the invention of words by 30,000 years.

This we know from cave paintings in different parts of the world that are 30,000 years older than the words that the first word-users began 30,000 years later to describe those cave paintings with.

And 43,750 years after the invention of pictures, we now believe that dance/pantomime, music, sculpture, and pictures/paintings are part of the classic arts.

What’s rarely talked about yet extra special about the classic arts is that they are older than words. But that’s about art, a different story altogether that will be addressed in a separate post when the time for art is right.

Back to pictures and words

In case you forgot, words were invented when the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet.

In other words, words were invented 13,750 years ago.

But we shall never know what happened after that because the witnesses are gone. All we can safely assume is that it was Event A or Event B before the other.

  • Event A: When words were new, 13,750 years ago, our ancestors had to invent 1,000 words before they could even begin to accuse pictures of speaking as many.
  • Event B: Our ancestors began to mistake picture — which at the risk of repeating myself is a word — for possessing the organs required to speak words, let alone 1,000 of them each.

Fact is, it didn’t take long for the majority of word-users to mistake words for what they aren’t.

Imagine that!

13,750 years later, Wikipedia speaks 2.916 words (about pictures), and any art critic worth their salt will find the number of words it takes to fill a book about the Lascaux cave pictures alone.

But no word-user today believes that words possess the organs required to talk because schools all over the world now finally teach that words are words, and the only ones with the organs required to use words are the teachers and students of words, that is the word-users.

But who am I, the author of THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY, to talk in turn?

I could be wrong.

Maybe schools all over the world still don’t teach the difference between the word and the word-user.

Maybe the 4 word-users below are right.

  • ”Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school.” – Plato (2,500 years ago)
  • “Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein (99 years ago)
  • “The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.” – Marshall McLuhan (74 years ago)
  • “When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” – Paul Simon (40 years ago)

Takeaway

The choices are there.

The decision is yours.

No other word or word-user can decide it for you.

This 13,750-year-old sales trick still works today

By In history, words, you

A 13,750-year-old sales trick continues to work as we speak, so you might of course want to know what it is and what we’re talking about.

Well, first things first, a trick is intended to deceive.

As you’d expect from a trick that has deceived without fail for the past 13,750 years — which is when the words got invented — is that it must have deceived as many word-users back when the age was stone, the Sahara green, and Northern Europe was under 1-mile-thick ice, as it continues to deceive now, 13,750 years later.

If you think that’s the 13,750-year-old sales trick this post is about, you’re spot on.

It’s as if time has left no trace on the workings of this nearly 14,000-year-old sales trick.

Sales implies that the trick is based on words. Needless to say, but for the purpose of this post I say it anyway, sales is a word, and so is trick.

In the wordless world, sales and trick don’t exist for obvious reasons. But in the wordy world, everything is different.

In case you haven’t read all my articles published since July 10, 2023, let me remind you that there exist two types of citizens on planet Earth, the word-masters and the word-users.

The word-masters are word-users that have known in the beginning is the word since the beginning of words.

The word-users do as told by the word-masters.

There’s nothing new about the word-masters, the minority, and the word-users, the majority. On the contrary, the relationship between masters and users has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and now is no different.

All of us

The word-masters and the word-users alike, that is all of us, know from personal experience that we depend on context and contrast to stay alive.

Should we lose our ability to be in charge of our own context and contrast, that means we simply surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from it. When this happens, you’ll be in trouble in the blink of an eye or by the end of the day, whichever comes first.

This we’ve known long before Maslow wrote it down for everybody to see, because, let’s face it, we’re all animals with words — though we love to pretend otherwise — so we know what we know with or without words learned at school.

After all, the 100% cells that we’re made of are wordless, too, and each cell knows much more than we’ll ever know.

The setup can be rigged

If you’re not in charge of your own context and contrast, then somebody else will be more than happy to take charge for you.

That somebody will likely be evil word-masters bent on taking advantage of this natural survival skill by rigging the setup in their favor.

When you surrender your senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from it, you have no rights left, and you don’t compare as you had initially intended, apples to apples, but you now end up comparing apples to oranges, or you can even be manipulated to believe an apple is an orange.

There are many ways to do this.

Takeaway

The challenge is knowing who is in control of the context and the contrast.

Make sure it’s you.

You can’t win with a losing hand.

The step-by-step guide to why the story of words isn’t told

By In history, words, you

Step 1

As you’d expect, your lesson begins with the first step.

Step number one is knowing that the word-masters have known in the beginning is the word since the beginning.

You don’t need to be a word-master to know what that means.

But you must know how it all began.

It all began with the invention of words, hence the saying “In the beginning is the word”.

Unless you’ve lived in a cave on a distant planet until today, I think you’ve likely heard about or seen in the beginning is the word in writing.

Before Words

Above marked in red, nothing that you now have a word for exists in the wordless world Before Words.

After Words

Equally marked in red, everything you now have a word for exists in the wordy world After Words because in the beginning is the word.

That’s how humanity and everything you have a word for began.

A word couldn’t be anything else if it tried, including you.

  • “Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating.” – Patrick Rothfuss
  • “What a word means, a sentence cannot say.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Therefore, without further ado, let’s move on to step 2.

Step 2

The story of words isn’t told because of Step 1.

If the story of words were told, it would be the death of the world’s longest-lasting lies.

  • “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” – Word-masters

In the beginning is the word.

God is no exception.

It couldn’t be anything else if it tried.

  • “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – Word-masters

Words were invented 13,750 years ago.
Writing was invented 5,000 years ago.
Nobody knows what word was spoken in the 8,750 years between the invention of words and the invention of writing.
We know that during the word’s first 8,750 years, they were spoken only, meaning from whence the words had come, tither they returned again.
We don’t know where that was or could have been.

Step 3

If the story of words were told, it’d be the end of the organizations built on the world’s most successful lies.

They couldn’t continue to tell them in peace.

Imagine that.

Step 4

Now you know why the story of words isn’t told.

“‎Strange times are these in when old and young are taught falsehoods in school.” – Plato

PS.

Whether a lie happened or not doesn’t matter. All that matters it’s believed.

Do you want a fresh perspective but don’t know how?

By In history, words, you

Why is it hard to gain a fresh perspective?

I think it has got to do — are you ready for this? — with professional golf teachers.

I’m told the hardest part for a professional golf teacher isn’t helping adult golfers develop a picture-book swing. The hardest part is getting adult golfers to stop using a bad one.

The same is true for professional word teachers.

The hardest part isn’t helping adult word-users gain a fresh perspective. The hardest part for a professional word teacher is getting adult word-users to change how to look at words.

Change how you look at words

When word-users change how they look at words, their worlds change.

You can bet your life on it.

Talk about a fresh perspective.

Nothing is believed until it’s true

Part of a fresh perspective is seeing, maybe for the first time, that the invention of words divided the word-users’ world into the wordless and the wordy.

Maybe also for the first time, it is seeing that the words and the word-users follow what preceded them since the birth of the planet 4.65 billion years ago, including the inventions of the eyes and the brains half a billion years before the invention of words.

Put differently, there’s no question about it, the words and word-users are part and parcel of evolution.

Without words (in the wordless world), there is no evolution.

Certainly for the first time, the final part of a fresh perspective is seeing that “Animal with words” appears under both the “WORDLESS” and the “WORDY” worlds at the same time.

That’s due to the fact that words don’t matter.

In that way, words defy our understanding of how evolution works.

Wordless

As depicted above, the wordless include not only the fire, air, earth, and water, but also everything invented by those 4 in the 4.65 billion years since they created the Earth.

In other words, the wordless include what the word-users name nature.

“To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.” – Claude Monet

Wordy

The wordy include the word-users, that is the animals with words (you and me), and the machines.

Machines excepted

Every word-user is unique like everybody else.

Therefore, it goes without saying but for the purpose of a fresh perspective I say it anyway, each word-user has their own truth(s).

In other words, to each their own.

The machines are excepted because everybody knows that the machines operate on programs and that the difference, if any, is not in the programmed machines, but in who is using them.

If it were different, all word-users would change how they look at words at the same time, all their worlds would change in the blink of an eye, and we’d gain the first fresh perspective since the beginning of words before the end of the day.

And here’s how to make this wishful thinking come true:

Don’t think twice in the beginning is the word.

Just think it once and for all instead.

Done.

Takeaway

If you ever want a fresh perspective again, but don’t know how, it’s simple to do.

Change how you look at words.

“Why are words not what my smartphone says?” is the question that I often get asked

By In history, words

Word-users ask strange questions

The strange question I often get asked is “Why is the word not what my smart phone says?”

In a world of complicated — an English-pronounced Latin word — simple is like one hand clapping, hard to be heard, or if you prefer, like a bird without feathers, hard to take to the sky.

Word and words are good cases in point.

Simple is a word that couldn’t be anything else if it tried. Naturally, so is complicated.

The difference between the two is that simple is work while complicated happens.

There are many ways to simple.

You can read simple quotes worth reading twice.

And there’s “Last Train to Simple (the crazy method to love life)”.

“Why are words not what my smart phone says?”

Long story short, there are two answers, simple and complicated.

The simple answer: Because your smartphone depends on the internet.

For the complicated: Ask the internet.

Actually, you don’t have to. I’ve done the hard work for you.

  • Wikipedia “the internet’s most-read reference work”
    “Internet: is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the world wide web (www), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing (followed by another 11,000 words)”.
  • Dictionary “the internet’s leading online dictionary”
    “Internet: Usually (except when used before a noun), a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide. The internet includes commercial, educational, governmental, and other networks, all of which use the same set of communications protocols.
  • BrainyQuote “providing inspirational quotes since 2001 to our worldwide community”
    “Internet”: If so inclined, check it out for yourself at https://www.brainyquote.com/search_results?x=27&y=12&q=Internet

The internet

“Gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than anything invented for that purpose before.” – Beat Schindler

“Why are words not what my smart phone says?” Part 2

Because all the internet knows about words is what it’s been told by the internet’s inventors who learned about words at school.

What’s wrong with that is that school doesn’t teach words and doesn’t tell the story of words. “School doesn’t teach” means school doesn’t teach words — what words are, what words do, and what words have — but that’s about school, a different story entirely…

  • “‎Strange times are these in when old and young are taught falsehoods in school.” – Plato
  • “The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.” – Marshall McLuhan
  • “If you end up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some talking head on television to do your shit, then you deserve it.” – Frank Zappa
  • “When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” – Paul Simon

…that will be covered in separate post down the line.

Back to smart.

“Why are words not what my smart phone says?” Part 3

Since the invention of the internet, things have changed.

Water has gone under the bridge and other stuff too.

The mothers and fathers of the internet are dead or old now.

They’ve been replaced by 6-year-olds, or by adults impersonating 6-year-olds, that are now telling the internet what they’ve learned at schools and universities about words.

If you want to know what that is, you’ll find it at the end of this post.

“Why are words not what my smart phone says?” Part 4

Because words — what words are, what words do, and what words have — are explained in The Origin of Humanity.

Of course, you’ll find The Origin of Humanity on the internet, here, at Amazon, and wherever worthy books are sold, but that’s not enough.

To understand words, and the origin of humanity, you must read it.

The Origin of Humanity is radically different from what your smartphone says. It might shock or offend for other reasons as well.

If the above reminds you of René Magritte’s painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, there is nothing I can do about it except confirm that’s how the cards are dealt.

That’s what smart is all about.

In broad brush strokes

  • “Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself.” – Patrick Rothfuss
  • “What a word means, a sentence cannot say.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • The appearance of words has revolutionized evolution.
  • Words are a prison, but even a prison is a home if you have the key.
  • The word-user was the word’s idea for getting more words.
  • Words are a gift we’re meant to keep.
  • Words are what the word-users respond to.
  • Words are how you aim at what you’re looking for.
  • Everything you know is a word.
  • Words do not only change everything you have a word for, they create it.
  • Words don’t describe the world, they describe how we see it.
  • Words have not only changed what we see, but how we see.
  • Words are the limits of your world. Once you see that, you’re limitless.
  • Words aren’t taught at school.
  • The story of words isn’t told. (Except here)
  • Word-masters have know in the beginning is the word since the beginning of words.
  • Words tend to get mistaken for evidence and often get treated that way.
  • The word-users love to use their words.
  • If you have a word for it, it’s a word.
  • Words can be denied only by confirming them.
  • If you ignore what words can do to you, then you can have no empathy for what words can do to others.
  • Words do not matter (they possess zero electric charge).
  • Words have no meaning.

Takeaway

There is more to it, but knowing words — what words are, do, and have — takes time.

Then it takes additional time to know you — what you are, what you do, and what you have.

All I can say is let yourself be surprised.

Better yet, surprise yourself.

“Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth.” – Bill Watterson

The surprise will be worth it in the end because these two — word and you — are all it takes for the limits of your world to metamorphose into limitless opportunities forever and a day.

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PS. What the internet knows about word and words

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

“A word is a speech sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or a combination of morphemes.”

Wikipedia (the world’s most read reference work)

“A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term “word” are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations. The concept of “word” is distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of language that has a meaning, even if it cannot stand on its own. Words are made out of at least one morpheme. Morphemes can also be joined to create other words in a process of morphological derivation. In English and many other languages, the morphemes that make up a word generally include at least one root (such as “rock”, “god”, “type”, “writ”, “can”, “not”) and possibly some affixes (“-s”, “un-“, “-ly”, “-ness”). Words with more than one root (“[type][writ]er”, “[cow][boy]s”, “[tele][graph]ically”) are called compound words. In turn, words are combined to form other elements of language, such as phrases (“a red rock”, “put up with”), clauses (“I threw a rock”), and sentences (“I threw a rock, but missed”). In many languages, the notion of what constitutes a “word” may be learned as part of learning the writing system. This is the case for the English language, and for most languages that are written with alphabets derived from the ancient Latin or Greek alphabets. In English orthography, the letter sequences “rock”, “god”, “write”, “with”, “the”, and “not” are considered to be single-morpheme words, whereas “rocks”, “ungodliness”, “typewriter”, and “cannot” are words composed of two or more morphemes (“rock”+”s”, “un”+”god”+”li”+”ness”, “type”+”writ”+”er”, and “can”+”not”).

ComputerHope

“Word may refer to any of the following: 1. When referring to a word processor, Word is short for Microsoft Word. 2. In general, a word is a single element of verbal communication with a unique meaning or use. For example, this sentence contains seven words. The English language contains several hundred thousand different words and Computer Hope lists over 15,000 computer-related words in its computer dictionary. Word classes or parts of speech are categories of English words that help you construct good sentences. These categories are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, determiner, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. In computing, a word is a single unit of measurement that is assumed to be a 16-bits in length value. However, it can be any set value, common word size values included: 16, 18, 24, 32, 36, 40, 48, and 64.”

Merriam-Webster

Click on Word Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster to see if you can believe Merriam-Webster’s take on words.

Merriam-Webster also wants you to believe that “a real word is when the word word has a wide range of meanings and uses in English. Yet one of the most often looked for pieces of information regarding word is not something that would be found in its definition. Instead, it is some variant of the question, What makes a word a real word? One of the most prolific areas of change and variation in English is vocabulary; new words are constantly being coined to name or describe new inventions or innovations, or to better identify aspects of our rapidly changing world. Constraints of time, money, and staff would make it impossible for any dictionary, no matter how large, to capture a fully comprehensive account of all the words in the language. And even if such a leviathan reference was somehow fashioned, the dictionary would be obsolete the instant it was published as speakers and writers continued generating new terms to meet their constantly changing needs. Most general English dictionaries are designed to include only those words that meet certain criteria of usage across wide areas and over extended periods of time (for more details about how words are chosen for dictionary entry, read “How does a word get into a Merriam-Webster dictionary?” in our FAQ). As a result, they may omit words that are still in the process of becoming established, those that are too highly specialized, or those that are so informal that they are rarely documented in professionally edited writing. But the words left out are as real as those that gain entry; the former simply haven’t met the criteria for dictionary entry–at least not yet (newer ones may ultimately gain admission to the dictionary’s pages if they gain sufficient use). However, in preparing your own writings, it is worth remembering that the dictionary encompasses the most widely used terms in English. Words that are left out may have usage limited to specific, isolated, or informal contexts, so they should be used carefully.

Oxford Learners

“Word is a single unit of language that means something and can be spoken or written.”

1 way I increased my knowledge by 1000% and so can you:

By In history, you

If the above could talk, what would they tell us?

We’ll never know because they won’t.

That’s the 1 (one) way I increased my knowledge by 1000%.

Let me share with you how it came about, so you can do it too.

Words

Words do not describe the world.

They describe how we see it.

To know what I’m talking about. For just a minute:

Imagine traveling by train at your own chosen speed.

The landscapes don’t unfold.

They don’t need to because they’ve been there all along.

But you discover them and you give them words.

As the train departs slowly, you realize, slowly at first, that in the beginning is the word.

That’s when you realize the unfolding is you, that’s how beliefs are formed, but also that it’s safe to relax for it’s only a train of thought.

“To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.” – Claude Monet

Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.

Increase your knowledge by 1000% too

Because you’ve imagined traveling by train at your own chosen speed, you’re halfway there already.

For the rest of the journey, I’ll teach you about words — the whole shebang, what words are, what words do, what words have, and what you are, what you do, and what you have — which is all it takes, words and you, for the limits of your world to morph into limitless opportunities forever and a day.

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If you’ve been told that in the beginning is 0, you’ve been SHAMMED

By In history, you

I’m not kidding.

Nor am I one to make a new opinion:

If you’ve been told in the beginning is 0 (zero), you’ve been SHAMMED.

In case you wonder what’s the opposite of SHAMMED, well, it’s genuine.

If you’re interested in genuine, and in how you and your family and friends have been shammed for the past 2023 years with no end in sight, then read on.

In the beginning

As you can see in broad daylight, I’m not one to make up new opinions.

There are no two ways about it.

In the beginning is the word

That includes the beginning of SHAMMED, which is a word — hence couldn’t be anything else if it tried — or we wouldn’t be here talking about you, shammed and genuine.

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, everything you have a word for doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

Whether that’s told, SHAMMED, or genuine doesn’t make a difference.

If you have a word for it, it’s a word.

Of that you can be sure: You can bet your life on it.

Call it a dream, it doesn’t make any difference.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world, at the risk of repeating myself…

  • In the beginning is the word.
  • In the beginning of every word is the word.
  • If you have a word for it, it’s a word.

In broad brush strokes

  • “Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself.” – Patrick Rothfuss
  • “What a word means, a sentence cannot say.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • “Call it a dream, it doesn’t change anything.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • The appearance of words revolutionized evolution.
  • Words are a prison, but even a prison is a home if you have the key.
  • The word-user was the word’s idea for getting more words.
  • Words are a gift we’re meant to keep.
  • Words are what the word-users respond to.
  • Words are how you aim at what you’re looking for.
  • Everything you know is a word.
  • Words do not only change everything you have a word for, they create it.
  • Words don’t describe the world, they describe how we see it.
  • Words have not only changed what we see, but how we see.
  • Words are the limits of your world. Once you see that, you’re limitless.
  • Words aren’t taught at school.
  • The story of words isn’t told.*
  • Word-masters have know in the beginning is the word since the beginning of words.
  • Words tend to get mistaken for evidence and often get treated that way.
  • The word-users love to use their words.
  • If you have a word for it, it’s a word.
  • Words can be denied only by confirming them.
  • If you ignore what words can do to you, then you can have no empathy for what words can do to others.
  • Words do not matter (they possess zero electric charge).
  • Words have no meaning.

*Except here

Takeaway

There is more to it, but knowing words — what words are, do, and have — takes time.

Then it takes yet more time to know you — the most important word in the alphabet — what you are, what you do, and what you have.

Let yourself be surprised. Even better, surprise yourself.

Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth.” – Bill Watterson

The surprise will be worth the time invested in the end because those two, word and you, are all it takes for the limits of your world to morph into limitless opportunities forever and a day.

Call to action

Join my waitlist to ensure you’ll be the first to be notified when my “Limitless Opportunities” course starts later this year when the harvest moon rises anew, give or take a few.

What to think of “the 1% versus the 99%” much talked about (and chances are it’s not what you think it is)

By In history, you

Or rather what not to think.

Because if you think the “1% versus 99%” much talked about these days to divide us, is new, you’re mistaken.

“The 1% versus the 99%” is as old as words.

To know how old words are, try imagining the time between the birth of Earth and the year 2023 in terms of 100%, instead of in years.

It might take a minute or two, to talk from experience, because the time between the two is 4.65 billion years.

Alright?

Now add to the 4.65 billion years the fact words appeared 13,750 years ago.

Then you realize that the first 99.9997% of Earth-time was not only wordless, but that it continues wordless infinitely.

Put differently, if the 4.65 billion years were a 24-hour day, words would have appeared a mere 3/1000th of an Earth-time second before midnight, that is 3/1000th of an Earth-time second before the dawn of the new day we’re in.

To put that into context, 3/1000th of an Earth-time second before midnight, the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet.

The story of words and of the inventions that preceded it

The story of words and the inventions that preceded it.
  • “In the beginning is the word.” – Word-masters
  • “There is magic in every beginning.” – Hermann Hesse

The invention of brains was magic.

500,000 years later, many among us agree the brain is magic, is usually how it works.

However, nearly the same number of word-users do NOT believe this same magic equally applies to the beginning of words invented 486,250 years after the brain, 13,750 years ago exactly.

This is a surprise because Hermann Hesse, albeit much later, wrote there is magic in every beginning, so every word-user can clearly see.

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, everything you have a word for doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

Whether that’s beginning, brain, or word doesn’t matter. After all, if you have a word for it, it’s a word.

You can bank on it.

Call it a dream, it doesn’t make any difference.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world of word-users, the early word-masters — the 1% — were the first to understand the magic of words, while the 99% — the early word-users — tended to mistake their master’s magic for evidence and treat it as such.

The same happens of course today with stories, but expecting words and stories to possess magic presupposes that the two have the organs required, which works for the 99%, but the word-masters are not eager to make that mistake.

Fact is, if the word-masters couldn’t tell a word from an organ, we wouldn’t be here today.

What difference has 13,750 years made?

The 1% are still the word-masters, and the word-users are still the other 99%.

Nothing has changed, except of course the word-masters’ names. Read on.

A brief story of word-mastery

  • 13750 years ago
    When words were new, fewer than 1% of the world’s nascent word-user population, the word-masters, could read and write. The word-masters were the world’s original version of us versus them, of the 1% that could read and write, versus the 99% that couldn’t. It follows that the 1% of word-masters were the first to realize that in the beginning of every word is the word.
  • 5,000 years ago
    When writing was invented, the word-masters owned everything it took — the ink, the papyrus, the paper, the scribes, and the storytellers — to have their stories told in faraway places. The reward system at the time — gold and land the word-master said was his — made it affordable. But that is about gold, a different story entirely.
  • 585 years ago
    When Gutenberg invented the printing press, still only fewer than 8% of Europe’s word-users could read (of which even fewer could write). It follows that the printing press was originally priced with the 1% — those who could read and write — in mind. For the word-users who needed to be told —the 99% — a printing press was out of reach.
  • 156 years ago
    With the invention of the typewriter, everything changed because the typewriter transformed every word-user into a storyteller. Of course, the typewriters weren’t used just for storytelling, but also for the production of reference works such as encyclopedias, thesauruses, and dictionaries.
  • 34 years ago
    Everything changed, again, when the world wide web also known as the internet was invented. The world wide web gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than anything invented for that purpose before. And because Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft — also known as Big Tech — realized this first, they are now the new word-masters, the new 1%, not because they have words, but because they have words about you.

Takeaway

All the truths add up to one big lie.

The author of The Origin of Humanity, I could be wrong.

However, of this you can be sure:

How the word-masters treat you is their power.

But how you respond is all up to you.

No other word-user can do it for you.

What to think of “the 1% versus the 99%” much talked about (and chances are it’s not what you think it is)

Or rather what not to think.

Because if you think the “1% versus 99%” much talked about these days to divide us, is new, you’re mistaken.

“The 1% versus the 99%” is as old as words.

To know how old words are, try imagining the time between the birth of Earth and the year 2023 in terms of 100%, instead of in years.

It might take a minute or two, to talk from experience, because the time between the two is 4.65 billion years.

Alright?

Now add to the 4.65 billion years the fact words appeared 13,750 years ago.

Then you realize that the first 99.9997% of Earth-time was not only wordless, but that it continues wordless infinitely.

Put differently, if the 4.65 billion years were a 24-hour day, words would have appeared a mere 3/1000th of an Earth-time second before midnight, that is 3/1000th of an Earth-time second before the dawn of the new day we’re in.

To put that into context, 3/1000th of an Earth-time second before midnight, the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet.

The story of words and of the inventions that preceded it

The story of words and the inventions that preceded it.
  • “In the beginning is the word.” – Word-masters
  • “There is magic in every beginning.” – Hermann Hesse

The invention of brains was magic.

500,000 years later, many among us agree the brain is magic, is usually how it works.

However, nearly the same number of word-users do NOT believe this same magic equally applies to the beginning of words invented 486,250 years after the brain, 13,750 years ago exactly.

This is a surprise because Hermann Hesse, albeit much later, wrote there is magic in every beginning, so every word-user can clearly see.

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, everything you have a word for doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.

Whether that’s beginning, brain, or word doesn’t matter. After all, if you have a word for it, it’s a word.

You can bank on it.

Call it a dream, it doesn’t make any difference.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world of word-users, the early word-masters — the 1% — were the first to understand the magic of words, while the 99% — the early word-users — tended to mistake their master’s magic for evidence and treat it as such.

The same happens of course today with stories, but expecting words and stories to possess magic presupposes that the two have the organs required, which works for the 99%, but the word-masters are not eager to make that mistake.

Fact is, if the word-masters couldn’t tell a word from an organ, we wouldn’t be here today.

What difference has 13,750 years made?

The 1% are still the word-masters, and the word-users are still the other 99%.

Nothing has changed, except of course the word-masters’ names. Read on.

A brief story of word-mastery

  • 13750 years ago
    When words were new, fewer than 1% of the world’s nascent word-user population, the word-masters, could read and write. The word-masters were the world’s original version of us versus them, of the 1% that could read and write, versus the 99% that couldn’t. It follows that the 1% of word-masters were the first to realize that in the beginning of every word is the word.
  • 5,000 years ago
    When writing was invented, the word-masters owned everything it took — the ink, the papyrus, the paper, the scribes, and the storytellers — to have their stories told in faraway places. The reward system at the time — gold and land the word-master said was his — made it affordable. But that is about gold, a different story entirely.
  • 585 years ago
    When Gutenberg invented the printing press, still only fewer than 8% of Europe’s word-users could read (of which even fewer could write). It follows that the printing press was originally priced with the 1% — those who could read and write — in mind. For the word-users who needed to be told —the 99% — a printing press was out of reach.
  • 156 years ago
    With the invention of the typewriter, everything changed because the typewriter transformed every word-user into a storyteller. Of course, the typewriters weren’t used just for storytelling, but also for the production of reference works such as encyclopedias, thesauruses, and dictionaries.
  • 34 years ago
    Everything changed, again, when the world wide web also known as the internet was invented. The world wide web gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than anything invented for that purpose before. And because Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft — also known as Big Tech — realized this first, they are now the new word-masters, the new 1%, not because they have words, but because they have words about you.

Takeaway

All the truths add up to one big lie.

The author of The Origin of Humanity, I could be wrong.

However, of this you can be sure:

How the word-masters treat you is their power.

But how you respond is all up to you.

No other word-user can do it for you.

Do you think you can cope with 155 billion if only you’d live long enough?

By In history, words

If given a chance, could you cope with 155 billion traffic signs, or with 155 billion musical notes, or with 155 billion beliefs, or with 155 billion smells, sights, colours, truths, thoughts, snowflakes, avalanches, or dollars, to name a few?

If you don’t expect to cope with 155 billion of anything, even if you lived long enough, then what makes you think you can cope with 155 billion English words? (Forget about the world’s other words for now.)

To understand 155 billion words, I think it’s best if you can convince yourself to pay the bulk of your attention to the story of words below for a minute or two.

Feel free to change the YEARS AGO depicted above. After all, that’s what words are for.

Depicted in the story of words is evidence of the fact that our planet has survived wordless during the first 4.65 billion years since its birth, but also that it remains wordless today.

Sure, having appeared 13,750 years ago, the words exist beyond the shadow of a doubt, but with less matter than the neutrino, the ghost particle, it so happens that words cannot be detected inside of a word-user by even the world’s most sensitive detector in existence, the LUX-Zeplin, in South Dakota, USA.

That’s just one of the reasons the appearance of the word has revolutionized evolution.

But that’s about evolution, a different story altogether (which will be addressed in a future post soon).

Back to the word.

The word defies our understanding of how the universe works, except that our ancestors named it (uni)verse for a reason.

Word number one

Back 13,750 years ago — the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet — when the first word was spoken, the number of words was 1 (one) by definition.

We shall never know what that first word was because the animal that spoke it has long been extinct, the witnesses are gone, and 13,750 years is a long time by most word-user standards.

We assume what spoke the first word was probably an animal, rather than a plant, that resembled us today. However, we don’t know which animal that might have been.

For all we know, they might have been different animals on different continents thousands of years apart, for the simple reason that words didn’t appear everywhere on Earth at the same time.

We also don’t know what the 1st word was, what said it to what, and what the one who heard it said back to the speaker.

What we do know for a fact is that more words got added over time.

How so?

Well, in the same way “The chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs” (Marshall McLuhan), so “The word-user was the word’s idea for getting more words” (Beat Schindler).

Both strategies, the egg’s and the word’s, paid off in more ways than one.

Words today

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, words don’t exist for self-evident reasons.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world of word-users, we’ve gone from 1 word 13,750 years ago, to the following numbers now (see below):

  • 24.9 million words
    According to wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary “the world’s most-read reference work”
  • 4.5 billion words
    According to collins.co.uk/pages/elt “analytical database with over 4.5 billion words”
  • 21.36 billion words
    According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries “the world’s most-read reference work”
  • 37.725 billion words
    According to www.english-corpora.org “the most widely used collection of corpora anywhere in the world”
  • 155 billion words
    According to www.english-corpora.org “the most widely used collection of corpora anywhere in the world”

In addition to the above numbers of words, the wordy also invented the world wide web, also known as the internet, which now gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than anything invented for that purpose before.

Where have 155 billion words got us?

155 billion words — with more added as we speak — have got us to the state the world is in, which is a different story entirely.

You will be pleased to hear that it will also be covered in a future post soon.

PS.

For your reading pleasure, if so inclined, regarding the insightful McLuhan quote above, click here for Marshall McLuhan Quotes Worth Reading Twice.

Call to action

In the meantime, join my waitlist to ensure you’ll be notified when my “Limitless Opportunities” and “Limitless Writing” courses start later this year, by the time the harvest moon rises anew, give or take a few weeks.

Do you think you can cope with 155 billion if only you’d live long enough?

If given a chance, could you cope with 155 billion traffic signs, 155 billion musical notes, 155 billion beliefs, or with 155 billion smells, sights, colours (or colors), truths, thoughts, snowflakes, avalanches, and dollars, to name a few?

If you don’t expect to cope with 155 billion of anything, even if you lived long enough, then what makes you think you can cope with 155 billion English words in just one lifetime? (Forget about the world’s non-English words for now.)

To understand 155 billion words, I think it’s best if you can convince yourself to pay the bulk of your attention to the story of words below for a minute or two.

Feel free to change the YEARS AGO depicted above. After all, that’s what words are for.

Depicted in the story of words is evidence of the fact that our planet has survived wordless during the first 4.65 billion years since its birth, but also that it remains wordless today.

Sure, having appeared 13,750 years ago, the words exist beyond the shadow of a doubt, but with less matter than the neutrino, the ghost particle, it so happens that words cannot be detected inside of a word-user by even the world’s most sensitive detector in existence, the LUX-Zeplin, in South Dakota, USA.

That’s just one of the reasons the appearance of the word has revolutionized evolution.

But that’s about evolution, a different story altogether (which will be addressed in a future post soon).

Back to the word.

The word defies our understanding of how the universe works, except that our ancestors named it (uni)verse for a reason.

Word number one

Back 13,750 years ago — the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet — when the first word was spoken, the number of words was 1 (one) by definition.

We shall never know what that first word was because the animal that spoke it has long been extinct, the witnesses are gone, and 13,750 years is a long time by most word-user standards.

We assume what spoke the first word was probably an animal, rather than a plant, that resembled us today. However, we don’t know which animal that might have been.

For all we know, they might have been different animals on different continents thousands of years apart, for the simple reason that words didn’t appear everywhere on Earth at the same time.

We also don’t know what the 1st word was, what said it to what, and what the one who heard it said back to the speaker.

What we do know for a fact is that more words got added over time.

How so?

Well, in the same way as “The chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs” (Marshall McLuhan), so “The word-user was the word’s idea for getting more words” (Beat Schindler).

Both strategies, the egg’s and the word’s, paid off in more ways than one.

Words today

In the wordless world

In the wordless world, words don’t exist for self-evident reasons.

In the wordy world

In the wordy world of word-users, we’ve gone from 1 word 13,750 years ago, to the following numbers now (see below):

  • 24.9 million words
    According to wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary “the world’s most-read reference work”
  • 4.5 billion words
    According to collins.co.uk/pages/elt “analytical database with over 4.5 billion words”
  • 21.36 billion words
    According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries “the world’s most-read reference work”
  • 37.725 billion words
    According to www.english-corpora.org “the most widely used collection of corpora anywhere in the world”
  • 155 billion words
    According to www.english-corpora.org “the most widely used collection of corpora anywhere in the world”

In addition to the above numbers of words, the wordy also invented the world wide web, also known as the internet, which now gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than anything invented for that purpose before.

Where have 155 billion words got us?

155 billion words — with more added as we speak — have got us to the state the world is in, which is a different story entirely.

You will be pleased to hear that the state of the world will also be covered in a forthcoming post soon.

PS.

For your reading pleasure, if so inclined, regarding the insightful McLuhan quote above, click here for Marshall McLuhan Quotes Worth Reading Twice.

Call to action

In the meantime, join my waitlist to ensure you’ll be notified when my “Limitless Opportunities” and “Limitless Writing” courses start later this year when the harvest moon rises anew, give or take a few.

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