Language

Thanks to Claude

Language is a pocketknife. Not a sword, not a weapon in the heroic sense, but a tool you carry with you, one that unfolds a different instrument depending on the situation. Sometimes the small blade for precise cuts, sometimes the corkscrew for things that are sealed shut, sometimes the scissors for what needs to be separated, sometimes the can opener for what does not open by itself. It is this versatility, this adaptability to the moment, that makes language more than just a means of communication. It is the infrastructure of thought, a bridge between people and, at the same time, something that can stand between them.

In German, you can seemingly describe everything. This language has a precision that can be unsettling at times. You can combine words until they become so specific that they fit only a single moment, a single experience. Verschlimmbessern. Torschlusspanik. Weltschmerz. Fernweh. Each of these words is its own universe, an entire landscape of meaning compressed into a single term. You can build sentences that stretch across lines without losing clarity, gaining accuracy instead. You can capture nuances that would require three paraphrases in other languages.

But this precision comes at a price. Especially when it comes to emotions, language becomes cooler, clearer, almost clinical. You can describe feelings, dissect them, break them down into components and name what is happening. Grief mixed with relief. Joy with an undertone of melancholy. Anger that is actually wounded helplessness. The German language can hold all of this, but in the moment it holds it, it also creates distance. It turns feeling into observing feeling. Experience becomes analysis. That is not bad; it is simply different. It is second-order cybernetics applied to the inner world: I do not just feel, I observe how I feel, and that observation changes the feeling itself.

This distance can be healing. It allows you, in a moment of overwhelm, to take a step back and say: what I am experiencing right now has a name. It is not diffuse, not elusive, not outside of any order. There are words for it. And those words create a space in which you can breathe, even when the air is thin. They are the linguistic handrail you need when walking along an abyss. But this distance can also isolate. It can lead to already no longer being fully present where the feeling sits at the very moment you speak. You stand next to it, describe it, analyse it, but you are no longer entirely inside it.

Language connects. That is its most obvious function. Two people talk to each other, and suddenly a shared space emerges, a common reality, an understanding. I say something, you understand it, and in that understanding we are connected for a moment. Language builds bridges over abysses that would otherwise be impassable. It allows me to find resonance in you for something I cannot carry alone. It turns isolated experiences into something shared, something that is no longer only mine, but ours.

But language also separates. It separates the moment it fails to capture certain experiences, when it is too coarse for what is felt, when it creates categories that exclude instead of include. It separates when someone lacks the words for what they are experiencing and the environment offers no concepts to grasp it. It separates when the same words mean different things in different mouths, when what is self-evident to me sounds entirely different to you. Language is never neutral. It always carries imprints: connotations, history, power. And sometimes it stands between people like a wall they try to break through, without realising that the wall is made of words themselves.

For me, language is this pocketknife because, in the situation, in the thought, in the moment, I can decide which tool I need. Sometimes I need precision, clarity, distance. Then I take the small blade and cut cleanly, separate one thing from another, name what is. Sometimes I need connection; then I build bridges with words, create space for shared understanding, invite, open. Sometimes I need to take something apart, deconstruct it, show how it works, where the mechanisms are, where the illusions arise. Then I use language as an analytical tool, as a method to make visible what would otherwise remain in the dark.

And sometimes I use language to lay out pros and cons without taking a side. Then it becomes a stage on which different perspectives are allowed to exist side by side, without me as the author sitting on a throne and deciding which one is right. I show what speaks for something and what speaks against it; I lay things out, I open spaces, I make complexity visible without reducing it to a simple answer. That is not indecision, not cowardice, not an escape from taking a position. It is the acknowledgement that some things hold multiple truths at the same time, that contradictions are allowed to exist, that not everything has to be resolved into a clear right or wrong.

Language gives me this agency. In the moment I speak, write, formulate, I have a choice. I can choose how I say something, which tone I strike, which metaphor I use, which perspective I take. I can make room for what would otherwise remain unnamed. I can keep the back door open by saying: this is one possibility, but not the only one. I can offer a linguistic handrail without determining exactly how someone must walk along it. I can make structures visible without claiming that I am the only one who sees them.

The pocketknife lies in my hand, but it does not belong only to me. Everyone has access to language, everyone can use it, everyone can decide which tool they need in which moment. That makes language something democratic, a commons we all manage together, even if some have more access than others, even if some are better at finding the right words, even if some grow up in semantically poor environments and have to build their concepts themselves.

And perhaps that is the true power of language: that it can be everything at once. Precision and poetry. Distance and closeness. Analysis and empathy. Separation and connection. It is not one tool, but many. And the art lies in knowing when you need which one, when you need to cut and when you need to open, when you need clarity and when you need to leave space, when you need to name and when you need to remain silent. The pocketknife only works if you know which blade to use for what. And sometimes you have to use several at once, because the situation is complex and a single tool is not enough.

Language can seemingly describe everything, but it cannot be everything. It can name emotions, but it will never be the feeling itself. It can create connection, but it will never replace touch. It can express truth, but it will never be truth itself—only an approximation, a version, a perspective. That is its limit. But within that limit, it is infinitely versatile, infinitely adaptable, infinitely powerful. It is the tool with which we shape the world while describing it. And that makes it more than communication. It makes it a practice, an attitude, a way of being in the world.

The pocketknife lies open on the table. All tools are visible. The only question is: which one do I need now? And am I willing to use it responsibly, with the knowledge that words have effects, that they shape what they describe, that they are not neutral but always do something? Am I willing to keep the back door open, even in my own texts, even in my own convictions? Am I willing to acknowledge that language belongs to me and at the same time to no one, that it is a network in which I am only one node—but a node with responsibility?

The pocketknife is ready. It waits to be used. Not as a weapon, not as an instrument of domination, but as what it is: a tool for the moment, for the situation, for the thought that needs form right now. Language as practice, not possession. As possibility, not certainty. As a space you can open—if you know how to hold the knife.

Written on 26 December 2025 at 14:25. © 2025 Whisper7. All rights reserved.