Inventing a New Language for Talking About Style
There’s a lot of talk about style these days. The problem is that our language has become so cluttered with terms, concepts, and techniques—it’s like having too many different kinds of pasta. A lot of conversations are reduced to a single sentence: “I really like this girl,” vs. “I really like that girl.” How are you supposed to convey meaning if you’ve got too many different ways of saying it? It’s no longer enough to just say the words, you have to figure out how to use language to get across the meaning you’re trying to convey.
It’s almost as if we’re talking about the difference between Italian and Spanish as opposed to how to say “I like that.”
There are some simple things we can do to make our language more accessible and less cluttered, and one of them is to change the way we use language to convey meaning. We’d like the world to understand how we think, and so we need to be able to describe how we think to others. Inventing a new language for talking about style would also be a great service to the world by uncluttering language and giving us a common language we could use to describe how to think. Here are some basic ideas to get us started.
The style of an individual should be described by the language they use
It’s not just about the kind of writing an author uses. When it comes to describing the style of an individual, we don’t need to know anything about their family, their education, or even their personality, because it’s what they do that is the important part of their style. An author could have this same style as a father, as a teacher, and as a lawyer, but none of those things are important to knowing what she does as an author.
The same goes for artists. If you’re someone who makes movies and plays they’re all about the way you look, then you’ve got the same style regardless of what other people’s opinions of you say. If you’re someone who makes art that people are interested in because they find it interesting or they enjoy the way it looks, then you are the same way even as