I had been thinking about language acquisition because, well, I was starting to wonder if language mastery was ever possible. Just thinking about the word “Cool,” for example. For context, let’s say you text someone something you perceive as fun. They respond, “Cool.” 

Interpret that. 

Well, don’t, because I asked Chat to interpret it and, er, it came up with over 100 different ways to understand the meaning of this simple word in this complex human context. The interpretations were all legit, by the way, and then Chat proceeded to detail the differences in formatting. Was there an exclamation point? A PERIOD?! Or WORSE… an ELLIPSIS?!! 

One word. 

This is pragmatic meaning: the meaning created not by the word alone, but by the situation around it. Who said it? What came before it? Was there a period? A delay? A history? Then add humans: creatures perfectly capable of recognizing this loophole in language and consciously crawling inside it with ill-intent. We let a word hover in plausible deniability, weaponize its ambiguity, then return to the scene and say, “Oh no, YOU misunderstood.”

So, it’s not language. It’s humans. And in that way, maybe AI gets us more than we do. Or maybe AI does not understand US better. Maybe it merely understands how many ways we AVOID understanding one another. In 300,000 years Homo sapiens still haven’t figured out how to remove ego from communication and decision-making. At this point there should be a Contra-Consciousness Booster: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. The shortcut to bypass ego when it becomes too thick. 

But the longer I think of a bad ego, the more I think that the part of us that interferes with language and meaning is tangled up with the part that creates authentic voice.  I think about my favorite authors, their distinctive voices. Like Maggie O’Farrell, when I was going through a transient, but tricky era in life. I remember roaming the bookstore and I opened her novel (The Hand That First Held Mine) and this is what I read:

“Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.”

That’s the first paragraph. 

It’s the kind of writing that you snuggle into and lean your head against to find its heartbeat. You take breaths with it hoping that if you can sync up your breathing, maybe you can also sync up your souls because you feel so close in that moment you want to brand it into your memories and senses forever.  

The O’Farrell quote is the physicality of words, which may be why it reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson typing passages by writers he admired to feel their rhythm through his own hands (to feel typewriter keys again!). One of those works was Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which contains another line I have carried with me. 

The priest, talking to Frederic Henry, says “I know them because I am like they are.”

The priest is not saying that he knows simple facts about the soldiers. He knows them from inside a shared moral position. They are people upon whom war is imposed rather than people who would choose to make it. Frederic sees categories (officers, enlisted men, priests) but the priest recognizes a deeper likeness that education, money, and rank cannot fully explain. “I know them because I am like they are” means that some forms of understanding come from recognition. We see something in another person because some part of it already exists in us.

Maybe ego is not what makes us beautiful. Maybe ego is the static: the defensive stance, the posturing, the small internal attorney creating loopholes, so we never have to admit what we meant. But beneath that is something else. A self. A Me. A shared history and at the same time a particular way of seeing that no other person can reproduce exactly because even if shared, it is seen through different lenses. 

That separateness is why “Cool” can mean a hundred things. It is also why Maggie O’Farrell can make trees feel restless and eager for a story. It’s why Hemingway’s priest can recognize himself in a group of soldiers, and it’s why Hunter S. Thompson could type another writer’s sentences without assimilating that writer’s voice. 

We can imitate words. We can study cadence and rhythm. We can even train a machine to chart every possible interpretation and every word. But the consciousness behind the words cannot be copied. 

Language may never give us perfect access to one another. Perhaps mastery is not learning how to eliminate every ambiguity, but learning when to clarify, when to listen, and when to offer someone the most generous possible reading.

Because sometimes “Cool” means cool.

And sometimes it means: There is an entire human being over here, hoping you will understand what I cannot quite bring myself to say.