Language as Physical Space

Using the internet is easy enough and can be taught to pretty much anybody. Explaining how the internet works is a whole other task. Where is it? Where does it come from? How is it all connected? Regardless of how correct it is, it's easy to think about the internet as existing in some "other" space that isn't connected to where we are physically. We just go on the computer and the internet is there, we're connected to an intangible space. But it can make it easier to think about the internet as a neighborhood. There's the internet as a whole, that we connect to with the highway that gets us into town.

After that, every single page is one building, all on one street or another, and each street would have a name, like a URL. This gets pretty literal, as the internet does operate a bit like this, in the sense that everything is located in a certain space, and all you have to do is type the correct address and it finds it for you, like CTRL+F. Super convenient right?

What if, like the internet, we thought about language this way as well? Our brain is the entire internet, and we search across our brain to find just the right word to say in every context. We have words we'll never forget and use every day, like a very, very long bar of bookmarks. Then there's words we've only heard of in passing, we're not as familiar with, like websites we've visited one time to read an article, never gone back, and now we can't remember the URL. Then there's the long list of words we've never heard. Websites we'll never go to.

If we extend this all the way back to the neighborhood analogy, language can be literally mapped out onto physical space. Every word occupies a space and sentences are just routes on a map. Going from place to place to place to create a specific chain of words, and the most important part - it's replicable. If you're telling somebody to meet you at a certain bar, they know exactly where to go, and you don't have to go together. It's a designated spot that's mutually understood, just like words. When somebody says a specific word, you know what they're talking about. You understand the meaning that they're trying to convey. If you've read this far into the article, you're following what I'm saying and you've known the meaning I'm taking from my head and putting into yours.