Sample: Personal Blog Post

Ausion

“This is the Design School.  If we can’t invent words here, where do you think they get invented?”

So said one of my professors at the GSD, although I am not sure which one.  I only remember the moment, the group of us, students standing around, the sense that he was knighting us all with life-long permission to invent words based on our educational affiliation.

The statement gave me an expanded view of language creation, and a life long internal debate about permission to invent words.  Aren’t they derived by groups over time?

I suppose, as a collective community of GSD students, we might have been a viable launchpad for new words, but one moment in time being knighted does not qualify me alone to officiate their invention. I do, however, see the need to invent at least one new word, (possibly a set of words).  Rather than claim educational qualifications, I will blame the mother of all invention.

By necessity, invention of the word discussed below solves a problem.

The word I hope to introduce into the English language is ausion.  The following is fodder for an OED definition mock-up:  1). What is heard in the creative imagination, in the mind’s ear.   2). The capacity for auditory hallucination.  3).  Mystical hearing of messages.

Admittedly, my efforts here are simplistic. I am trying to create a definition as flexible to the auditory imagination as the word, vision, is to the visual imagination. As it stands, we use this word, vision, to explain the imagination of every sense. (What is your “vision” for that recording, the perfume, that dance step, that vintage?)

The word, ausion, is experienced, by me, as missing, as absent, in relation to the word vision.  I have often used the word ausion to discuss what I hear in my imagination before it is realized.  I have been using the word ausion for years in this capacity.  I just wish it were rife with innate understanding.  I usually have to explain it, gain agreement among the small group of musicians to whom I am speaking, and remind.  And as I write this, ausion is underlined by my word processor in red, begging spell check.

“Vision” as a word, is like a junk drawer.

The matter goes deeper than the flawed assignment of this word to mean all forms of sensory imagination. The vision sense is, of itself, overtaxed. As Naval Ravikant has said, “We are probably evolved to use all of our five senses equally as opposed to favoring the visual cortex.”

On the other hand, there is one truth that makes me think that vision must actually be bigger than the rest. And that is the fact that we were given a mechanism for shutting it out.  We close our eyes to think. We close our eyes to meditate. We close our eyes, voluntarily. We close our eyes at the behest of someone hoping to surprise us. And when we sleep, we can hear the sounds around us, we can smell whatever’s wafting through the air, we can feel the sheets or the person in our bed, we can taste what’s in our mouth, but our body has a mechanism that we proactively use to shut down the visual sense. We close our eyes.

However, bigger or not, the word “vision” doesn’t signal the auditory imagination (or the olfactory one, or the kinetic one, or the gustatory). Semantically speaking, “vision” is a junk drawer.

How vision got it’s meaning — And “audition” didn’t.

The first meaning of the word, vision, is “a seeing”. The word, vision, has had a distinctly different path of development from the word audition, which means “a hearing”.  At first glance, I wondered why audition didn’t fill the role of meaning that included  *the realm of the imaginary and the mystical, but in the case of the word, vision, the imaginary and mystical meanings came first, related to the supernatural, whereby in the case of audition, they did not come at all.  That explains it, I suppose, but it doesn’t solve the problem.  And I propose that we solve it and not stop there.

I propose that we find better words for imaginers in each of the senses. Wine makers and perfumers could benefit from a word that defined the olfactory imagination, and chefs can taste food in their imaginations while cooking it up in their minds.  Dancers imagine the kinetic experience, pressure on the limbs, centers of balance, distances traversed, when choreographing.  All of these have to answer to the question, “so what is your vision for that?”   Brainstorming answers to these gaps in language one might assign official status to words like olfacision, tangustion, kenetion, but none of these are as straight forward, as obvious, as ausion, so I would like to start there.

Why aren’t we democratically designing our new words by vote?

And that brings me to a new point. Why aren’t we voting words into the vernacular by committee? I see them sneaking in from the side, from the cool youth, but in this age of global collaboration, why don’t we have a collective website for the English language whereby new words and meanings are proposed, and then collaboratively refined and voted upon, based on the need for nuanced meaning? Of the many things I found to ponder after my GSD experience, one was the incessant international commentary on the holistic youngness of our culture and the ineffectiveness of our language to alight on subtleties of meaning. I heard that from my fellow international students ad- nauseam. Such is the advantage of feedback. I did agree with them. Might we become more intentional about creating new words by committee?

I started wondering if there is a web site whereby new words, words not used to be cool, hip, rad, dope, or woke, but to service the nuances of meaning as yet unaddressed in our language, can be proposed and voted upon. I think that, in this age of global collaboration online, such a process would be fitting.

I didn’t know if such a thing already existed.   Its mission would enable everyone contributing to the meaning of a potential new word, and then a number of millions of people agreeing upon it, and then an official designation to the official dictionary, by the people, for the people.  As stated by Wittgenstein, in 1922, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

So, while the vernacular is expanding organically, I sought a site where we could collectively drill down on precision and on nuances of meaning, where we could set up crisper lines of articulation between us when communicating. English is steadily becoming a global language, and we are the collective leader of that language. What I found, down the rabbit hole of inquiry, was a few abandoned projects akin to this proposal, none of them really all that democratic.  If I am wrong, please correct me.  I want to be wrong.

As things stand, as a means to establishing new words, the standard word creation apparatus — compounding, blending, clipping, affixation —all happen organically over time, and new words are usually within these aforementioned processes. The origin of the word “woke,” for example or “adulting” are simply the addition or removal of prefixes, suffixes, etc.

However, I picture these casual, interactionist word origins sparking into being at some tucked-away, pillow-strewn coffee table scene over a bong hit, then traveling the meandering path of chance communication, and finally arising unpredictably as an addition to the vernacular, or as a signal of its energy, sidelong into the Zeitgeist. And that is all well and good, even fun, and I love the color and flavor of that path of language development. However, what I am talking about is something more intentional. What I am talking about is something the mature adults might do, as part of their legacy to the English language, so that it gets rightfully expanded into the mature formal language we need for communicating.

Being called a young civilization is getting old. We are a civilization of dreamers and builders, creative thinkers, shakers and movers, designers of life. I just want to make sure we have the language we need to communicate about it.

When I find a word like vision standing in for every wild imagining, no matter what the sense, I think we might get more intentional about precision around these nuances, about filling in the gaps. Even if we refer to generalized meanings of “vision” such as, from the Cambridge Dictionary, “an idea or mental image of something,” the mind must pass through the inference of “sight” (image) in order to arrive at articulate meaning. When I am designing music in my mind, aloud or otherwise, that mental path is so much red tape.  I would love to hear conversations about creation and design that articulate the senses involved.  To hear someone say, “Close your eyes, I want to tell you my ausion for this project.”