Interesting bit of graffiti I saw today. Way deeper than it seems at first. Ignore the spelling mistake. In fact, I think it’s a feature, not a bug.

“Before love I used to think words ment something.” True statement, maybe even truer than they thought. It’s also a paradox. Love is something words can’t express. But they said it with words.

That got me thinking. Language itself is a kind of paradox. A sentence never really “means” anything, because it’s made out of words, not the thing it refers to. Like an internet friend said on the subject, “It’s only a paradox because you’re using words.”

“The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a ‘semantic disturbance’ is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.”

— Alfred Korzybski

I’m definitely not the first person to think of this. Wittgenstein explored the subject, as did Alfred Korzybski, quoted above. Surrealist Rene Magritte’s famous painting “This is not a pipe” is a good illustration. It definitely represents a pipe, but you can’t smoke it. It’s a symbol, just as words are symbols.

Here’s a good video on the subject.