Some words don't lose their meaning
They lose their neighborhood.
I’m sorry.
This word is already taken.
Overbooked.
Come back tomorrow. Try another one.
The word is still there. It’s in the dictionary. Nobody banned it. Nobody stops you from writing it.
And still, you can’t get inside it anymore.
Not because it changed meaning. Because it changed neighborhood.
There are neighborhoods where something like this happens. They don’t disappear. Same streets, same buildings, same names. Even the same bakery on the corner.
But one day you come back and you don’t recognize anyone. You don’t know exactly when it happened. You just feel something hard to explain: the neighborhood is the same, but it doesn’t seem like yours anymore.
I think some words are living through that.
They haven’t stopped holding meaning. They’ve started pulling in too many people. Not dictionaries. People. Millions of sentences pouring into the same words until it gets harder and harder to tell who’s speaking.
I know because it happened with mine.
Curated. Criterion. Friction.
Even inevitable.
Words I’d used for years. And one day I started writing them and stopped halfway.
I deleted them.
Not because they’d stopped saying what I meant. Because they’d started sounding like someone else had written them before me. And there it was, a discomfort I hadn’t counted on. Like a pebble in your shoe.
The nuisance in the heel of using the word, no. The other one. The one of finding out I’d started watching them. Like someone at the window counting new neighbors.
That’s when I asked myself something I still can’t answer. With this, am I defending language… or defending my neighborhood?
Some people live this with anger. It’s understandable. For a long time language was expensive territory.
Expensive not in money. In time.
You had to read. Write. Get it wrong. Find a voice.
Now the barrier to entry is much lower. And when that happens, the same conversations show up that show up in any neighborhood.
That we used to have standards. That now anyone can. That this isn’t what it used to be.
If you think about it, getting angry over this is defending a customs house. And customs houses around language are almost always built by whoever was already inside.
Gentrification starts pushing to the edges everything that doesn’t fit. Everything that takes too long. Everything that asks more time than we’re willing to give it.
And inside, everything starts to look the same.
One neighborhood looks like another that looks like another. The same café with the same tiles in three different cities. One message that looks like another message. The same voice coming out of mouths that have never met.
It sends to the outskirts what doesn’t fit. And clones into the next prompt what does.
There’s an overbooking of words. And more tourists than residents.
But the difference isn’t between who got here first and who just arrived.
It’s between those who pass through a word, take the photo, and keep walking… and those who decide to stay and live inside it long enough to hand it back a meaning that can’t be confused with the one next door.
No card grants that.
Not the intellectual’s. Not the technician’s.
Not even the one who writes for a living.
The one who just arrived can do it better than whoever’s been here all their life. Because inhabiting a word was never about owning it. It was about knowing exactly how much it weighs.
And then a machine arrived.
I don’t know if you write with it. I don’t know you well enough. But I do know you talk to it. And every conversation hands back words that don’t show up by chance. They show up because they’re the most probable.
The ones that work best. The ones that have proven useful most often.
Like when you leave a conference and spend two weeks using the same expression you just learned.
Only now we all leave the same conference.
Sorry.
The same summary.
And little by little we start to resemble each other, not because we think alike. But because the road to our words starts in exactly the same place, with a bluish light and a cursor that no longer blinks.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com
Leí una vez que Borges era muy celoso de las cosas que le gustaban. Tanto, que si descubría que a alguien más también le gustaba, a el dejaba de gustarle. Yo no llego a ese extremo. Puedo compartirlas con unos pocos sin sentir celos. Pero cuando la palabra sale de ese círculo y empieza a estar en todas partes, ya me incomoda. Es posible que se deba al esfuerzo de tener que salir a buscar otra.
En esa búsqueda de la tan ansiada diferenciación me encontré con Hartmut Rosa y Lo indisponible. Ahí me enamoré de una palabra: resonar. Sentía que decía exactamente lo que llevaba tiempo buscando. Pero la descubrí tarde. En muy poco tiempo tenía innumerables amantes. La veía en todas partes y mis celos me obligaron a abandonarla.
Ahora me haces acordarme de ella.