Most people find Finnegans Wake hard to understand; some consider it mere nonsense. If you examine it closely, however, it uses a form of semantic data compression. Consider the following sentence from the book:

When a part so ptee does duty for the holos, we soon grow to use of an allforabit.²

You can interpret this in a number of ways, all of which can be correct. Ptee means petit, French for small, but also p-t, the letters of the alphabet. Allforabit is a blend of alphabet and all for a bit. When we understand that holos is Greek for whole, we are ready to interpret this sentence as something like this:

When such a small unit as a letter or word does duty for entire objects, we soon grow to use, and grow used to, an alphabet. When small parts do duty for the whole, we soon grow to use (and grow used to) representing everything at once by a small part.

This sentence is Joyce’s critique of language: we cannot represent reality accurately, because any use of p and t is bound to reflect only a fragment of it. It is also his praise of language (we can do so much with so little), and his description of how nat language or Blnder works.

The passage is also a good example of the seeming prescience of the Wake. I’m not going to claim that Finnegans Wake has magic powers, but I will point out Joyce’s use of seemingly up-to-the-moment words such as bit (as in 0 or 1, the basic unit of information) and holos, which could be taken as the plural of holo or hologram. The fact that these words, and such postmodern concerns as the relationship of part to whole and information to reality, appear in a book written so long ago suggests to me that it still has much to offer in the 21st century.

Paronyms are words that are spelled or pronounced somewhat differently from each other and have somewhat different meanings. If you combine two paronyms, you can create a blend—or as Carroll called it, a portmanteau.

Some research has been done on paronymic blending by psychologists studying production errors in speech, such as malapropisms (speech errors involving paronymic substitution, such as “Stop that! You’re making a speculum of yourself!”). Malapropisms are common among words that sound similar, have the same number of syllables, and are stressed identically.³

This suggests that phonologically similar words are stored near one another in the human neural lexicon. Researchers have suggested that blending “errors” occur when two words in the lexicon, such as imposter and impersonator, are similar semantically and enter into the later stages of sentence production together, forming a portmanteau like imposinator.⁴ Since semantically and phonologically similar words seem to be stored near one another in the brain, it might be possible to learn to communicate fluently in Blnder.

But what if people don’t understand the blends? Certainly, ordinary static language might be needed for technical communication. In other situations, people could blend at will, and explain their blends in ordinary language if necessary. Successful blends might be reused, and the vocabulary of Blnder would grow.

Eventually, Blnder might be able to describe in a word a freeform emotion, state of mind, or other complicated phenomenon that would require a sentence of ordinary language. Dictionaries of neologisms and foreign words (not necessarily blends), such as They Have a Word for It,⁵ The Deeper Meaning of Liff,⁶ and Family Words,⁷ do this already

Why not increase the expressiveness of our language, by using and spreading these and other new words?

Here are a few Blnders I’ve collected over the years. Swet dreams was produced with a “perfectly balanced mind” when wishing someone goodnight, and I actually believed when I was a boy that pless was a common word.

Blnder is not the province of only great writers of literature such as Joyce and Carroll. Everyone can use it to blur his language and at the same time enhance its precision. One English translation of the Joycean phrase nat language is night language, and Finnegans Wake depicts an epic dream, so Joyce might have used a tool such as onar [Hack #28] to learn how to blend fluently. It worked for me.

So try onar. Keep a dream diary [Hack #29]. Read Finnegans Wake. Practice punning. Blend a few paronyms. A new form of language might be near.

Here are six well-known constructed languages that can help you think and express yourself in novel ways.

The controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis⁴ states that there is a direct relationship between the categories that are available in a language and the way the speakers of that language think and act. While if it were true that language completely determined thought, people would never have any thoughts that they could not express (and we know that’s not true), there have nevertheless been some suggestive experiments in this area. For example, it was recently shown that one Amazonian tribe without words for numbers greater than two cannot count reliably higher than two or three.⁵ Skeptics have pointed out that causation may run the other way: the tribe never developed words for numbers because they never needed to develop the concepts.⁶

As mentioned earlier, Lojban was designed to be a comprehensive test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that enabled its speakers to think logically, clearly, and creatively. However, it’s doubtful that there will ever be a full-scale experiment of the sort its designers envisioned, because there may never be many fluent speakers of Lojban, and the number of native speakers is approximately none.

You can learn a lot about language and the human mind by creating your own language. Does that sound audacious? The Language Construction Kit web site⁷ by Mark Rosenfelder explains how to create your own language sounds, alphabets, words, grammar, even speaking and writing style, as well as an imaginary history for your language, and a family of related languages.

Here are a few tips for doing so, partially inspired by Newitz and Palmer’s flowchart in The Believer ⁸ but mostly indebted to the Language Construction Kit. For a crash course in linguistics and cross-cultural human thought styles, and much more information than I can possibly convey here, please visit that site.

To use this hack, simply eliminate all uses of the verb “to be” from your communication for a given period of time, whether an hour, a day, or the time it takes you to write an email that you fear will turn into a flame.

People who speak E-Prime often choose to eliminate all forms of “to be” rather than just the so-called is of identity and is of predication. D. David Bourland, Jr. (inventor of E-Prime) and E.W. Kellogg III liken this to the situation faced by someone trying to quit smoking: although the health benefits of cutting down from two packs of cigarettes a day to just two cigarettes a day might amount to almost as much as quitting entirely, almost no one can do it. Similarly, many people who choose to speak E-Prime eliminate “to be” cold turkey because they find it easier than analyzing each use of “to be” to see whether it involves identity or predication.²

As a further exercise, you can try to catch writers in the use of particularly unjustified uses of “to be”; it will alert you to other people’s propagandistic appeals and hone your awareness of your own use of the Verb That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Kellogg suggests that once you get better at speaking in E-Prime, you offer your spouse or a close friend $1 every time they catch you using “to be” without immediately correcting yourself.³ As a somewhat less costly alternative, try snapping yourself to attention [Hack #74] with a rubber band on your wrist.

You might also find that eliminating “to be” from your speech and writing forces you to express yourself more creatively. Try it! If this phenomenon interests you, you can experiment more with it by constraining yourself further [Hack #24].

I wrote this hack entirely in E-Prime, except for the examples. Of course, I intended this as a purposeful, rather than arbitrary constraint [Hack #24].

Briefly, the mnemonic for each Morse code letter is a word or phrase beginning with that letter. In Table 6-1, unaccented (unstressed) syllables represent dots in Morse code, and accented (stressed) syllables represent dashes.

.-

-...

-.-.

-..

.

..-.

--.

....

..

.---

-.-

.-..

--

-.

---

.--.

--.-

.-.

...

-

..-

...-

.--

-..-

-.--

--..

-----

.----

..---

...--

....-

.....

-....

--...

---..

----.

This hack is yet another example of the power of mnemonics (your dear, dear friend). Remembering the dry and abstract dots and dashes of Morse code is like having to remember an arbitrary and cryptic series of commands to a computer’s command-line interface. Creating English mnemonics, however, is like adding a graphical user interface on top of the command line. Simply put, it’s like the difference between Windows and DOS.

Why would you want to learn Morse code, anyway? After all, haven’t telephones and email made Morse obsolete? Not at all. Morse code is still useful in a variety of situations ranging from technological breakdown during emergencies to interfacing with the latest technology, such as texting devices.

The best basic strategy to handling stage fright is to first reduce it to a manageable level and then to use what’s left to make your performance more powerful—to give you “stage presence.” You should perform some of the following techniques well ahead of time, some soon before you speak, and some right before you start and during your performance.

Why does stage fright grip us so tightly and irrationally? Probably because we form our feelings about it in childhood. Young children speak to people freely and express their thoughts as well as they can, without reticence. However, most of us got our first experience speaking to a group at school. We probably had in the audience a teacher ready to grade our performance and classmates who would certainly make fun of it if we made a mistake or looked silly at all—partly because making fun of us would help quiet their own fears about speaking.

So, we learned to believe that if someone in authority watched us, we would be judged, and that the rest of the audience was hostile and waiting to pounce on any slip-up. Reminding ourselves that we’re reacting to old information that’s no longer relevant to the present situation can help quell those deep-seated fears.

The technique of channeling stage fright into performance power stems from the idea that the body’s state of arousal is interpreted by the mind within a framework of emotional reaction and knowledge about the current situation. Under stress, the body creates a surge of adrenaline, pounding heartbeat, heightened senses, faster breathing, and related reactions. Whether we feel those physical effects as fear, exhilaration, sexual arousal, rage, or something else depends on how we feel at the time and what we believe is going on. It’s part of the reason that some people are turned on sexually by danger or pain, or have a good time at a scary movie or on a frightening roller coaster.

Psychologists Schachter and Singer showed that situational factors cause us to frame physiological effects.¹ They gave a mild stimulant to a group of subjects and then placed some of the subjects with a person who exhibited anger and others with someone exhibiting happiness. In both groups, more of the people who had been given the stimulant self-reported strong feelings mirroring the “emotional leader” than those who hadn’t received the stimulant that produced the physiological effects of arousal.

A similar experiment by Dutton and Aron showed how the mind can shift the effects from one kind of arousal to another.² In this study, an attractive woman interviewed men, some on a swaying rope bridge 200 feet over a river and some on firm ground. During the course of the interview, she gave the men her phone number. More than 60% of the men who talked to her on the rope bridge phoned her afterward, compared to 30% of the men who talked to her on the ground. They had interpreted the heightened arousal level that was produced by the more dangerous situation as greater attraction.

With the techniques in this hack, you’re replicating the effects of these studies intentionally. By consciously reframing physical sensations, we can often convert one emotional reaction to another, in this case transforming fear into excitement that we can transmit through our performance.

I learned a great deal about acting and public speaking in high school and college. I performed in community and semi-professional theater, took acting classes, and competed in public speaking tournaments. I didn’t grow up to be an actor or a professional speaker, but I’ve found the experiences I had and techniques I learned to be invaluable in later life. To name only a few situations where the skills have served me well, I’ve used them to:

In fact, these techniques have become so much a part of me that it was difficult for me to dissect them to write the hack! I consider it some of the most important training I’ve ever had. If you’re a parent, this is also a strong endorsement to encourage your kids to study some acting, debate, and speech techniques while they’re young.

Marty Hale-Evans

In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman writes about his experience teaching a group of students in Brazil:²

One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during a lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question.’”

Because all the students were afraid to ask questions, Feynman got highly frustrated and came away convinced that the students were not actually learning anything at all. Too often, in a learning situation, we tend to just nod and allow the instruction to progress without adequate comprehension. Even when we are in a one-on-one learning situation with just an instructor, the temptation to sit passively often results in a monologue. We do this for several common reasons, each of which is a fallacy:

So, what should you do? A much better method is to be active, not passive:

Whether we are studying quantum chromodynamics or just making a new friend, a similar process is occurring in our brain. We are building a mental model of the subject we are learning so that we can run mental simulations against it to predict future behaviors. Indeed, the model we build internally should be robust enough for us to predict behaviors that were never described during the initial learning process, if it is to be considered anything other than rote learning.³

Since there is no way to import mental models directly into the brain (not yet, at least!), we must build them piecemeal, as we might assemble a model airplane. To continue the analogy, the instructor is handing you pieces of the model, and you are assembling them internally. If the instructor is handing you pieces too quickly, you will not have time to assemble them. Further, if you assemble part of the model but are unsure about it, there is no point in continuing to add pieces.

At your new job, you are tasked with helping to maintain a large, complex web site. There is a lot to learn: database structures, passwords, server locations, error-reporting procedures, source code revision-control systems, build procedures, and so on. There’s some documentation, but as is usually the case, it hasn’t been kept up-to-date. So, other employees who are familiar with the project have to teach you.

You are eager to impress your new colleagues, so you start learning your new project with vigor. The person walking you through it all is initially impressed as you quickly fly through the different areas you are supposed to learn. You might have missed some finer points, but you don’t want them to think they’ve made a mistake in hiring you, so you stay mum.

You can still repeat back some of the information you’ve been taught, at least at first. But as the days go by, your initial comprehension seems to vanish in the wind, and your co-workers become less impressed as they have to start answering questions about things they’ve already told you about.

What should you have done? You will ultimately be judged by how quickly you are able to contribute to the project, not by how knowledgeable you seem up front. Stupid questions are to be expected, and would have quickly been forgotten. When you’ve had enough for one day, call it quits, and go back and review what you’ve learned so far. Continuing is just a waste of your and your co-workers’ time, and will ultimately reflect poorly on you.

Mark Schnitzius

Read the following sentence to yourself:

Did you have to read it a couple of times to get the meaning? It’s grammatically correct, but the comma has been left out to emphasize the problem with the sentence.

As you read about Bob, you add the words to an internal buffer to make up a phrase. On first reading, it looks as if the whole first half of the sentence is going to be your first self-contained phrase (in the case of the first, that’s “While Bob ate an apple”)—but you’re being led down the garden path. The sentence is constructed to dupe you. After that phrase, you mentally add a comma and read the rest of the sentence...only to find out it makes no sense. Then you have to think about where the phrase boundary falls (Aha, the comma is after “ate,” not “apple”!) and read the sentence again to reparse it. Note that you have to read it again to break it into different phrases; you can’t just juggle the words around in your head.

Now try reading these sentences, which all have the same meaning and increase in complexity:

The first two sentences are hard to understand, but make some kind of sense. The last sentence is merely rearranged but makes no natural sense at all. (This is assuming it makes some sort of sense for an old lady to be swallowing cats in the first place, which is patently absurd, but it turns out she swallowed a goat, too, not to mention a horse, so we’ll let the cat pass without additional comment.)

Human languages have the special property of being recombinant. This means a sentence isn’t woven like a scarf, where if you want to add more detail you have to add it at the end. Sentences are more like Legos. You can break them up and combine them with other sentences, or pop them open in the middle and add more bricks.

Have a look at these rather unimaginative examples:

Humans understand sentences by parsing them into phrases. One type of phrase is a noun phrase, the subject or object of the sentence. In “This sentence is an example,” the noun phrase is “This sentence.” For the second, it’s “This boring sentence.”

Once a noun phrase is fully assembled, it can be packaged up and properly understood by the rest of the brain. During the time you’re reading the sentence, however, the words sit in your verbal working memory—a kind of short-term buffer—until the phrase is finished.

Verb phrases work the same way. When your brain sees “is,” it knows a verb phrase is starting and it holds the subsequent words in memory until that phrase has been closed off (with the word “example,” in the first sentence in the previous list). Similarly, the last part of the final sentence, “of sentence structure,” is a prepositional phrase, so it’s also self-contained. Phrase boundaries make sentences much easier to understand. The object of the third example sentence, instead of being three times more complex than the first (it’s three words, “long, boring sentence,” versus one, “sentence”), can be understood as the same object, but with modifiers.

It’s easier to see this if you look at the tree diagrams shown in Figure 6-1. A sentence takes on a treelike structure, for these simple examples, in which phrases are smaller trees within that. To understand a whole phrase, its individual tree has to join up. These sentences are easy to understand because they’re composed of very small trees that are completed quickly.

Figure 6-1. How the example sentences form trees of phrases

We don’t use just grammatical rules to break sentences in chunks. One of the reasons the sentence about Bob was hard to understand was that you expect, after seeing “Bob ate,” to learn about what Bob ate. When you read “the apple,” it’s exactly what you expect to see, so you’re happy to assume it’s part of the same phrase. To find phrase boundaries, we check individual word meaning and likelihood of word order, continually revise the meaning of the sentence, and so on, all while the buffer is growing. But holding words in memory until phrases complete has its own problems, even apart from sentences that deliberately confuse you, which is where the old lady comes in.

Both of the first remarks on the old lady’s culinary habits require only one phrase to be held in buffer at a time. Think about what phrases are left incomplete at any given word. It’s clear what any given “caught” or “by” words refer to: it’s always the next word. For instance, your brain read “The cat” (in the first sentence) and immediately said, “did what?” Fortunately the answer is the very next phrase: “caught the spider.” “OK,” says your brain, and it pops that phrase out of working memory and gets on with figuring out the rest of the sentence.

The last example about the old lady is completely different. By the time your brain gets to the words “the cat,” three questions are left hanging. What about the cat? What about the spider? What about the fly? Those questions are answered in quick succession: the fly the old lady swallowed; the spider that caught the fly; and so on.

But because all of these questions are of the same type, the same kind of phrase, they clash in verbal working memory, and that’s the limit on sentence comprehension.

A characteristic of good speeches (or anything passed down in an oral tradition) is that they minimize the amount of working memory, or buffer, required to understand them. This doesn’t matter so much for written text, in which you can go back and read the sentence again to figure it out; but you have only one chance to hear and comprehend the spoken word, so you’d better get it right the first time around. That’s why speeches written down always look so simple to understand.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore the buffer size for written language. If you want to make what you say, and what you write, easier to understand, consider the order in which you are giving information in a sentence. See if you can group together the elements that go together so as to reduce demand on the reader’s concentration. More people will get to the end of your prose with the energy to think about what you’ve said or do what you’ve asked.

Matt Webb and Tom Stafford