The type of gesture came by chance, but the silence didn't. I thought of a way to reach as many people as possible. And the best way was not to speak. — Khaby Lame
Khabane "Khaby" Lame (born 9 March 2000) is a Senegalese-born TikToker based in Italy. He became known for his short comedy skits where he sarcastically and wordlessly ridicules people who seem to unreasonably complicate simple tasks — Wikipedia
Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak — Laozi
qui tacet consentire videtur — TheMadFool
Silencium Universi (The Great Silence) — TheMadFool
What silence signifies depends on context. — Ciceronianus
Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost. — Khalil Gibran
The term "unsaid" refers what is not explicitly stated, what is hidden and/or implied in the speech of an individual or a group of people.
The unsaid may be the product of intimidation; of a mulling over of thought; or of bafflement in the face of the inexpressible. — Wikipedia
There is no escaping ambiguity. If you think you've reached the end of it you need to think again, and keep talking. We cannot outstrip the deficit of understanding and clarity in anything we say.
If polar oppositions are a functional tool in reason, the most encompassing polarity is that between strangeness and familiarity. Between the overwhelming impossibility of saying anything real and the entrenched addiction to facile hearing of words and reading of signs. The stranger is the subject, the facile attribution is the predicate. That's just how it works. Forget that, or, worse, deliberately exclude it, and language is just vapor. — Gary M Washburn
The problem is silence is ambiguous - it, as you seem to be aware, sometimes means something and at other times means nothing. So, if no one is saying anything, either they're not saying anything or they are. — TheMadFool
It seems to be ascribed meaning when it is noted. In other words, when it's unexpected, as in the case where a response is either anticipated or desired — Ciceronianus
It's the whole point. The addiction of facile semiosis, or natural language, is that the stranger we are to what we think we mean is kept at bay and only emerges in the lessened terms of estrangement we encounter in every exchange. But that estrangement is the engine of all the other addictive terms of facile speech. And if the discipline of engaging in that speech entails a kind of rigor in sustaining that facile performance of it and access to it, lessening the estrangement always haunting it, then the dynamic of that rigor (emotion) and that haunting (the completeness of estrangement) is the real story of language. — Gary M Washburn
I don't hear words but I see a lot of body language, which I believe to be a universal form of communication. Human bodies speak volumes, and unlike their owners, they're usually very truthful. — Vince
The type of gesture came by chance, but the silence didn't. I thought of a way to reach as many people as possible. And the best way was not to speak. — Khaby Lame
What kinda gestures are aliens making across intergalactic space? Are gestures themselves of limited utility given how alien biology may differ from our own? How can life perform a gesture that betrays its existence? — TheMadFool
I said "form of communication" because body language is not technically a language, and "universal" was meant to apply to known life forms. — Vince
I just learned a word, kinesics, "the interpretation of body motion communication such as facial expressions and gestures, nonverbal behavior related to movement of any part of the body or the body as a whole. The equivalent popular culture term is body language", according to Wikipedia — Vince
I like to expand the definition of body language beyond visual cues. Bodies can communicate information with sounds, whether they're simple or complex. There's also olfactive communication, and ultimately physical contact.
So if you have troubles telling an alien you mean business, just kick him in the butt, once you've found it. — Vince
Why? What is the definition of language? — TheMadFool
He says that he wants to reach out to as many people as possible and that meant, for him, he was not to utter a single word. Why? — TheMadFool
The question is how does Khaby Lame's tactic/strategy fit in with your observation? — TheMadFool
I believe language applies to complex forms of communication that use words, syntax and are able to express the most abstract thoughts. — Vince
I get you. Wu wei! Thank you. — TheMadFool
Is this meant dismissively? You seem to think language is a one-way street. It's not the content of our assertions that engenders meaning, it is the drama that ensues that alters our terms. If that alteration is the product of a rigorous process meant to conserve our terms, then the generated change cannot be less rigorous than the attempt at conservation of terms. And if the exchange is reciprocal the change is more shared between interlocutors than the original terms of assertion are the property of each alone. That is, we cannot know what we are saying until we know each other. The meaning of terms is intimated, not explicated — Gary M Washburn
Actually, I'm asking you to think smaller, not bigger. I'm not even challenging conventional wisdom about how reason works. Merely that there is a limit. That limit is that the infinitesimal cannot be deemed negligible without cost. That cost is the synthetic term. Everything. All that meaning is. If we must start with the familiar to find the stranger, in ourselves and each other, but require complete conservation of all terms relevant to a rational progression, then ignorance is enforce upon us. But if estrangement from that continuity of terms is the most rigorous product of that commitment to it, then we can only meet ourselves and each other as that estrangement. That is, the change in ourselves we each bring to the moment of that estrangement of the continuity if terms is met as a contrariety as much to that continuity as to each other. We make ourselves a community in contrariety to conventional terms is a character of change that itself has no term that can ever become convention, but is symmetrically opposed between us. That symmetry would, and in some ways does, become itself a kind of edifice of conventional terms, but is thwarted by the simple case that any continued exchanges are not only already modified by the moment we share, in the character of that community we make ourselves there, but, so altered from the body of terms antecedent to it, and so disparate in the character each of us is in it, that the moment of estrangement that then ensues cannot be symmetrically related to its antecedent. The stranger does not augment mechanically, but grows organically. Each moment as unprecedented as bewilderment always is, but each moment more contrary to the limit of reason than to who we are together at that limit. But if you have not a clue what this means, I don't see how you can expect me to supply all of them. And, as you might say, I am without a clue too. Yes, we do need to suppose our terms are synchronized some to begin to speak, but to limit ourselves to that throws out the project of speech wholesale.
How small a thing is it that we differ? How small a thing can we afford to make it before silence does prevail? If the smallest thing of all, the tiniest difference we can possibly hope to neglect at the end of rigor, is all the differing we are capable of articulating fully and competently, then it damn well behooves us to relish the moment of it, for the rest is babble. Only as that moment do we recognize ourselves and each other. And, of that moment, do we only recognize ourselves through each other, as the symmetry of difference each is there to the garbage we always carry with us to discourse.
Time is the characterology of change. All ideas devolve from the drama of this. But there is no language, nor any term in any language, that can bring us as near that characterology as the moment of estrangement, from the terms of enduring time language always is, that we share as we vie with each other not to differ from the terms we feel we must continually and without beginning be familiar with. And so, we diminish the stranger to a limited term, but ultimately find the stranger is always who we really are. And the least term of that estrangement is always more comprehensive, and comprehensively real, than the limiting of it. Ideas are not structural units than can be assembled into edifices of 'justified' ignorance and run through mechanistic rituals of induction. We can and do rely on an ability to do this, but ignore the wilderness as the final and least term of that ignorance at our peril. The peril not only of losing our way ahead, but of losing the meaning of our origin. But if you attribute some vague sweeping intent on my part you're not paying attention. Nothing could be more precisely delineated than that moment where bewilderment is proved our differing with each other more united us than any supposed synchrony of terms. Of that moment we each recognize the worth each brings to the differing of all terms that, structurally, enforce ignorance and neglect of that worth. If for you language is a construct you really are bereft of clues. The worth of human effort in all this is the whole story. That effort is not a term at all. There is no clue I can give you. — Gary M Washburn
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