mot juste (n) the exactly right word or phrasing
—Merriam Webster
The most important benefit of reading and listening at length is to develop more felicity with using words. Ways of phrasing and thinking rub off on you with exposure to language as wielded by other people. More so than just acquiring new clichés and newly coined buzzwords, I’m thinking of all the ways which thoughts and perceptions can be ordered and built up and expressed so as to bring you, the reader or listener, into a new relation to the world and everything in it. We learn language every time we partake in it. The reward, in turn, is that one’s own speech and writing and thinking becomes enriched. Our thoughts and utterances become more nimble and nuanced and precise—or, just as importantly, direct and coarse and vague—as required.
The words we use should fit the contours of the forms we are seeking to capture in speaking or writing them. And those forms must be placed and proportioned well in the situation or world wherein we claim they exist. This is a poetic fashioning, an art. To speak is to create.
Better yet, the words we use to capture forms should spring naturally from our contemplation or perception of them.
To speak of fashioning or creating sounds like work. It implies the hunt for le mot juste. But the goal, developmentally, is more like a passive, receptive state—the words are their, hanging, waiting to be plucked. They fly come off the tongue or pen or fingertips unbidden. The first might entail groping through an thesaurus or other source* in search of an inspired fit. The second is an inspired state.
*Here I am stymied by the challenges of the very subject of which I write. Surely there is a better word than “source” in this sentence.
Most style guides for writing intended for public audiences advise, more or less, language which can be understood by a precocious high-schooler. But language development absolute should not stop at high-school.
I believe that the second state—an easy ability to find language to capture novel situations in words—is the result of an analogical overdetermination in one’s perception.
What’s a Meta For?
“,” write the collaborative editors of Wikipedia. When you have one literal name for a thing or situation, you can call it by its name—and that’s it. When the sensory experience or recollection of that thing or situation immediately evokes several analogies, all of which flood to the fore at once, you have an abundance of meaning blooming toward your tongue or hand. At that point, the mot juste is cultivated from the bloom, as a florist cuts the finest flower.
This is my experience when talking and writing on subjects which I know deeply. To know a subject deeply means to have read on it enough such that you’ve encountered many different people writing on it in a way which a literalist would find redundant or repetitive.
I am reminded of this because of an interview Jonathan Haidt recently recorded with Tyler Cowen of the “Talking with Tyler” podcast. I found it rather befuddling. While Haidt takes pains to try and elaborate the importance of embodied play and face-to-face communication for childhood development, Cowen appears to not even hear him. Here is the question which starts that conversation, and several follow-up questions to Haidt’s answers (which I’ve omitted).
COWEN: Let’s turn to your book, which again, everyone, is called The Anxious Generation. You’re worried about screen time. Why isn’t it the case that AI quite soon is simply going to solve this problem? That is, you’ll have your AI agent read the internet for you, or your messages or whatever, and if you want it to talk to you or give you images or digest it all, isn’t it going to cut down on screen time immensely?
Screen time seems super inefficient. You spend all this time — why not just deal with the digest? Maybe in two, three years, AI cuts your screen time by 2X or 3X. Why is that so implausible?…
If screen time is making kids so miserable, why won’t they seek out methods to make their screen time more efficient? You seem to suggest they won’t. It’ll just be more and more screen time. AI will help them do this. You get a digest, convert anything to spoken word? You just do everything through earbuds if you want to…
If screen time is making kids so miserable, why won’t they use new AI innovations to lessen their screen time? If they don’t want to stare at the screen, turn messages into voice through earbuds, turn it into images, whatever makes them happier. Why are they so failing to maximize?
At first, I couldn’t even figure out what Cowen was trying to say. Are kids who play 8 hours of video games jonesing to compress the whole game into 20 minutes? Do speedrunners play fewer rounds of a game for beating them more quickly? Has TikTok, with its shorter videos, shrunk hours of YouTube watching into a few minutes? Would I rather have a highlights reel of my mother than a talk with my mother? A trailer over a movie?
Eventually I figured it out. The key was realizing just what sort of human subject Cowen is describing here—it’s a busy adult like him, fully formed and capable of and employed toward fixed, targeted goals. Haidt strains to make it clear that he’s discussing childhood development, to no avail. This evades Cowen completely, who was apparently never a child. Haidt even employs relatable language. He discusses the “opportunity cost” (a metaphor borrowed from economics) of spending so much time on a screen when the number of hours in a day are fixed. But for Cowen it seems, there is some specific, defined amount of information one is always looking to get from the screen; the more efficiently the better. Computer-use as an experience—the virtual world as a place to dwell and loiter and play within—totally evades him.
There is so much wrong with projecting Cowen’s personal, utilitarian motivation for “screentime” onto anybody, let alone children, that I barely know where to start! First of all, information is not a substance. Secondly, learning something the long, inefficient, redundant way is the surest way to learn. It’s the way to learn things such that they come to you when you need them.
I’ve read many books on the same subject. Because of this, I’d like to think, I’ve found many different analogical “hooks” for my knowledge of that subject to graft itself, spontaneously, in my perception and words as le mot juste.
Studying a topic deeply facilitates better recall on that subject, because you understand it in many more ways. The more subjects you know deeply, the more can offer themselves as a potential bridge for your audience to cross. For instance, Haidt had to know a little bit about economics in order to borrow the metaphor of “opportunity costs” and apply it to developmental psychology. That’s an analogical resonance—a metaphorical leap which his mind performed to make sense of the situation he was trying to discuss.
The Conscious of the Thing
Cowen’s naive conceptualization of information as something which one might desires to receive as efficiently as possible is a too dangerous to leave unremarked. The pursuit for optimizing the “efficient” “digestion” of information is, followed through to its natural ends, a path to cognitive suicide. In this interview, Cowen pays no recognition to the learning process, to development or growth as part and parcel of experience.
Without knowing him, I’ll venture to guess that he thinks learning and experience are discrete tasks. If I’m write, then he thinks that getting the fact is the learning—the experience one takes in getting that fact is not. Learning as an experience would then be, logically, something scheduled and performed according to optimal techniques. Learning English, or any other language, would entail enrolling in a course, reading and studying prescribed literature, studying grammatical forms or figures of speech, and then passing an exam or writing a dissertation at the end. Learning is a package—a commodity.
Put that way, surely you can see the problem. We are always learning, and we are always learning language—we can’t help but learn it with every exposure! With every newspaper headline or ad copy or interlude of the radio DJ, we are relearning our language and finding new metaphors and uses for expressing what we already know. Embodied, face to face communication pairs that language with gesture, with emotion, with decorum and varying sorts of relations. Communication in the flesh both uses language to its fullest and transcends it—we are sharing directly in experiences even as we distance ourselves from them by discussing them.
There is no “digest” of refined, high-density information which can buy a child more hours in a day to grow up with. Digesting information for themselves is the growing up.
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Redundancy is inefficient in Cowen’s conceptualization of information. It’s like a .zip file the way he speaks of it—take it dense and compressed and then it will just unpack itself somehow into its fullness in your mind when you need it. If you only need it right now, then fine. Look up a fact, use it, throw it away. But don’t act like that fact is going to stick around after the next forty winks.
Knowledge which sticks around, which we actually learn, requires us to have a relation to it. It is the experience of information expanded which makes up our lived relation to it, and teaches us how to expand that same information when we receive it again compressed. In other words, knowing a bunch of facts means nothing when they don’t rise to surfice in one’s mind—leap from one’s tongue or hand—when their relevant place manifests before us
“To the blind, everything is sudden,” said McLuhan, and so it is with the acoustic, or metaphorical properties of language. So it is with extemporaneous speech—which is nearly all speech. The correct .zip file fact from some A.I. generated digest,you efficiently consumed once three years ago through your earbuds is not going to spring to mind and expand into a soliloquy the instant you need it to. People don’t work that way. Rather, the month you spent reading a long book, or series of articles, or hours of speeches or audio you listened to, will have given you a whole memory to recall in the pertinent moment. It is the memory of the time you invested in investigating a thing which hooks it into your perception; which informs your sensibility. The feeling of recognition in the moment—I’ve been here before!—requires having a memory of the experience of learning it.
Cognitive Suicide
Doug Rushkoff has recently written about large language models, the sort of A.I. which is supposed to be digesting the world for you.
These are compositional techniques for rhetoric, yet many people think we’re creating life itself. We are not. We are really just creating another layer of abstraction: a way of mining all the rhetoric we’ve put out there and then synthesizing it into forms that simulate language without using any knowledge or thought. Real thinking is to an AI like waves are to a latitude line.
In an AI, there is genuinely no one home. It’s all model. No reality. It’s looking at everything we’ve ever modeled – or at least all the models that we’ve digitized (and that human beings have tagged for it) and then developing language around those models. It’s all a form of auto-tuning and auto-completion — of taking what has already happened and putting it back together in the most statistically probable way. As Alfred Korzybski would remind us, the map is not the territory; but neither is the model.
Statistics cannot determine le mot juste. They cannot find new analogies from the overdetermination of meaning in a moment’s flash of perception. What determines any given word in an A.I.’s “digest” is the the plausibility, or likelihood, that that word would be there surrounded by those preceding and following. It’s not an act of perception—no new meaning is being made. Now, one could likely learn a great deal of one’s language from the remixed words regurgitated by an LLM—the output is often very poetic and stylish. But untethered from the embodied and shared situational-awareness of two people speaking, or one person reading one or several pertinent texts, the “efficient” compression of information into the densest, shortest form possible must, by necessity, go in one ear and out the other.
The subject who has developed a relation to language in this orientation—where one is reading for facts or content—is impoverishing themselves. We’ve all read books which start with an abstract description of some concept or process, and then go on to several case-studies or analyses of those concepts in action. It is the long putting-on of language, the experiencing its application in the wild, which trains your ability for analogy. In life, as you go about your day encountering new situations, you are likewise perceiving what you see by analogy. The more relevant situations and experiences which a scene or situation or thing inspires in you, the more material you have to cut and shape and derive the meaning in what your senses are revealing to you.
But if you haven’t had the exposure to language adequate in talking about those analogies—you find yourself in trouble. This is what I mean by cognitive suicide. Every situation is novel, and sometimes overwhelming so. That’s chaos—but chaos isn’t necessarily unreadable. What happens is that the world is becomes full of meaning which you can’t find the words for. You reach for whatever you can grasp, you try and force the pieces to fit.
I’ve been there, trust me. When you perceive things which you have no language to talk about, you’re socially isolated, alienated. Stupefied and mute. Others can’t enter into your perception—you lack the words or metaphors they’d be familiar with—or the ability to proportion those metaphors to fit into the common scene. You know the words you want to say would sound crazy—sometimes you’ll say them anyway, sometimes you’ll just remain mute.
The literal mind, in this situation, often just begins building formal models instead. Creating structures, coining new terms, inventing jargon to fill the vacuum when no relatable metaphors or stories already-existent in culture are salient enough to come to mind. It’s schizophrenic. You see this style of writing all over the internet—people starved of the language necessary to describe the new just start erecting tent-poles of their own fashioning to stop the sky from falling in on them. “Come into my tent!” they beckon with their twisting, confused, manic prose, hoping to save as much as be saved in their ersatz little universe.
We are entering into a very strange world, given the things we are creating and the lack of language we have for discussing and proportioning and fitting those things into our perception. We are liable to just begin making up our terms, providing definitions, slapping Germanic fixtures onto Latin roots or stealing names from mythology and sci-fi and concepts from textbooks. Already, more and more people are grifting their little model patchwork lifeboats to other scared, panicking people. They corrupt speech with tortured jargon and corrupt thought with propositions which extrapolate into absurdities.
Ad-hoc conceptual models, made to frame chaos, are no substitute for language composed of les mots justes. And les mots justes derive from analogical perception; from a lifetime officiating the wedding of the world to the words which describe it. Not just ideas put simply, but ideas expressed well and in fullness and in just great degree of metaphor and redundancy and decorum.
Man in the Mirror
I wish Tyler Cowen all the best, and if he values living it optimally, I wish him success there too. If the facts he takes from his style of learning work their way back into his perception of the world, his discernment of other’s meaning, the fabric of his socialization, the poetry of his prose, the substance of his podcasts, then good for him. It seems like they’re not, but I’ve never heard of the guy and maybe this one interview with Haidt was just a fluke.
But your kids are not wherever he’s at—and likely neither are you. I get the sense that Cowen has spent a lifetime developing his style of learning to develop and gain the efficiencies he desires and has gotten to a good place. But children are starting from scratch. They cannot start from where he is at. A.I. cannot minimize their screentime, and spare them misery, the way he thinks it will.
Maximizing the efficiency of our “screentime” is not the route to improving our language skills. And language is how we think—even people without inner monologues are thinking through their ideas when they talk or write about them, making them part of their world. That’s what all learning is ultimately about: not the accrual of more and more facts, but the integration of knowledge, as communicable and words, into every aspect of your articulated, embodied life. The strategy, then, is two fold.
Firstly, spend more time speaking and reading and writing well, always in an upward direction, always challenging your current ability. Select subjects which challenge you, either because they’re unfamiliar or because they use language more complex than found in newspapers or best-selling books.
Secondly, always be planning or stumbling into novel embodied experiences to fill your mind with memories. I mean memories you can recall and chew over and agonize over and revel in. Memories to express as stories to yourself or to friends or in speeches or in writing, again and again, in ever-fresh retellings. Not every experience needs to be an adventure either. Recounting your day at the dinner table, journaling your trips down the crowded sidewalk, or even just your routines are worthy of examining with the distance of words. Listening to stories told by acquaintances, and seizing the curious things in them, allow you embody the language of your curiosity with your gestures and expressions and tone of voice. Play of that sort is infinitely more valuable than mimicking the cadence or tones of recordings, staring at yourself in a mirror, or studying Dale Carnegie-like strategies for carrying on conversation. It’s not a copy; it’s really you, inside and out.
Make language in the long-form part of your life. If you do, then your problem will always be having too many words—overdetermined meaning—than too few. To speak, or to write, will be the work of selecting the best example, or the best metaphor, rather than search and hunt and strain for what is lacking. I promise: if you sacrifice your time to appreciating your language then, when you need them most, les mots justes will find you. Always.
And hell! Look at the alternative! It’s either that, or A.I. will soon read and listen and think and speak for you.
I suppose not making or owning any of your own decisions could be rather efficient—but then what need is there for you as the middle-man? Beware the efficiency-seeking A.I., trying to live your life for you in this zany world of ours. In living your life, it’ll soon find you to be the inefficiency.
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