“In the beginning was the Word.” (John 1:1)
Our blinking and mind-teasing hardly indulge us to turn to the philosophical idea of the Logos on a daily basis. We are quite used to expressing ourselves by means of hollow words, oversaturated metaphors and reduced communicative formulas, akin to memes and emojis. We often find ourselves barehanded without in-app messenger stickers and gifs. Words don’t come easily to us. And those that do come, appear to be somehow insufficient. Now, words are only needed when photos or videos don’t suffice. They seem to have lost their status as the ultimate means of communication.
Nonetheless, words still matter. The whole world is still divided by language zones rather than by state borders or intercontinental waters. In a single global society connected through the internet, you can communicate almost without boundaries within the scope of your own communicative skills.
One of the words that is going to matter during the next couple of hundred years is ‘nim’. Its pronounced with a long vowel [i], embraced by two nasal consonants [n] and [m] respectively. Such a phonetic construction fits most human languages. Less than 2% of known phonetic systems lack nasal sounds. As for the other 98%, the word ‘nim’ is easily pronounceable.
What is ‘nim’ made of
Being a short monosyllabic word, ‘nim’, is nevertheless semantically capacious. It contains and correlates with six essential concepts relating to the human condition. They are (1) being (or “I am”), (2) human, (3) time, (4) soul, (5) mind, and (6) mother. An amusing mental exercise of translating these concepts into major human languages reveals one interesting observation.
Vowel [i], along with consonants [n] and [m] are among the most frequent sounds used in all the major languages for naming the above-mentioned six concepts. To understand the idea of nim, basically, we need a handful of words. These words represent life itself. That is why ‘nim’ represents them.
What ‘nim’ stands for
In technical terms, a ‘nim’ is one minute of one human life. There’s a whole bunch of math and engineering behind that. This text however, is not about that. It deals with nim mythology which is all about definition and semantic significance. Would we want, however, to give ‘nim’ a dictionary definition, it might look somewhat like this:
nim noun
/nɪm/
: a single lived minute of an individual human life
: a unique digital unit of value, generated by a real human
: a mathematical and digital trace of every minute of every human life
: an absolute and unconditional value originating from the limited space and time of a human life
nim verb
to nim; nimming; nimmed
: to perform a transaction with nims
: to use nims to express one’s attention, acknowledgement, or admiration.
nim adjective
: of or relating to nims
: operated by nims
To sum up, a nim is emitted by a Soulful, Mindful, Human Being in Time, given to us by Mother Nature: one every minute.
