These 5 rePhrases Make You Smarter

Use language as a technology to improve your thinking.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

― E.M. Forster

It was Neil Postman’s book Technopoly (1992) that first alerted me to the idea that language is a technology for organizing and communicating thought.

And it is more than that.

Marshall McLuhan realized that we shape our technologies, and our technologies shape us back. That is, the technology of language not only helps us externalize our thoughts, but it also changes the way we internalize our perceptions. Thus, the purpose of language is more than a mere communication of messages. It is a technology for improving the quality of our thinking.

As a technology, language provides affordances (i.e., makes some things easier) and imposes constraints (i.e., makes some things impossible).

For example, once we become accustomed to thinking in words, it is (unconsciously) easier to think about those things for which we have words, and very difficult to think about things for which we don’t. That’s why English is constantly adding new words — to…