Words are empty vessels

To experience fullness you must glimpse the emptiness

In a Buddhist temple, a teacher pulls a ballpoint pen from his pocket. He places it on the ground in front of his students, and asks, “What is this object?”

“A pen! Very clearly a pen!” they respond. 

He places the pen in front of a dog and asks again. “What is this object, for him?”

To the dog, that object is not a pen, but a flavorless bone. To the baby, it is not a pen but a teether. To the sheet of paper, it is a creative partner. To the river, it is a stick that refuses to decompose. 

Every viewer brings their own lens and observes something different in that pen. The pen is an empty object that can hold a world of meanings.

Just like a word.

Semantic satiation is when you glimpse the emptiness of a word.

Seconds before, you saw a word with meaning and intent, but you’ve seen it so much that now it’s just lines and dots. This is also called “Wordnesia.” When you’ve seen a word laid bare, you’ve come face-to-face with emptiness. Not emptiness as in the lack of fullness, but emptiness as in the cosmic embodiment of a blank canvas.

What’s left is a shape. It’s up to you to remember what goes inside. This fact can rattle the most chill of writers. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night and not recognizing your own room.

Fortunately, semantic satiation is temporary. Style guides, dictionaries, and context clues fill the shape back in before you break into a cold sweat.

Art by Chelsea Larsson

But words are wild animals. Even these seemingly empty forms evolve before our eyes.

Semantic drift happens when the definition or use of a word moves from one meaning to another. The word “gay,” for example has had many lives, and is living one of its best right now. Semantic drift is evolutionary proof of our living language.

The challenge of being a writer, and especially an editor, is wrangling these empty vessels in a rapidly changing world. How does one corral these wild animals while also allowing them to grow? 

Euphemisms, for example, can be helpful or harmful. “Collateral damage” is a polite alternative to “needless civilian death in wartime.” Who benefits from obscuring the truth? And why?

And sometimes words backflip on you. “Literally” now means “figuratively” in common usage. Do you progressively champion this shift like a hip grandma (slay), or stand athwart history and cry stop? There is no right answer, boo. (That’s a new word too.)

All you can do is keep reading, but not in the way you might think.

Between the words you write and the meanings they point to is the wild canyon of humanity. 

Emotion and wildness run through this canyon and your job is to ride alongside them. You will track patterns of human behavior, you will suss out the shape of feelings, you will step away from the page and read the world with your body.

When you feel like your words are empty, turn towards life. 

Eat ice cream. Touch grass. Stand directly under a sunbeam, eyes shut tight, and tilt your head till your eyelids glow. Hear a ridiculous knock-knock joke from a three-year old that makes no sense. Laugh! The punchline is life itself. Journey into the realm of meaning. Read aloud to hear what words feel like. Live aloud to know what meanings mean like.  

To sound human, be human.

Words are empty vessels and you are too. Fill ‘er up.