I’ve been reading Ludwig Wittgenstein, a German philosopher fascinated by a seemingly simple question: What do words mean?

“One thinks that learning language consists in giving a name to objects,” Wittgenstein writes. “To repeat – naming is something like attaching a name tag to a thing.”

Yet, as he points out, language is far more complex than that.

“Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old an new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.”

A word’s meaning is dependent on context – when it’s used, how it’s said. Is it followed by a question mark or an exclamation mark. Does everybody have the same understanding of the word being used?

Through countless language-games (Sprachspiel), Wittgenstein argues that language is always in exact, and that understanding the inexactness is critical to communication.

“Only let’s understand what ‘inexact’ means!” he exclaims, “For it does not mean ‘unusable!'”

Indeed, an inexactness of language does not mean we are unable to communicate. It just means that we are likely to be misunderstood.

And of course language is inexact, he argues. “Thinking is surrounded by a nimbus.”

“What is essential now is to see that the same thing may be in our minds when we hear the word and yet the application still be different. Has it the same meaning both times? I think we would deny that.”

Wittgenstein even demurs from defining the word “game,” though it’s used heavily throughout his work.

“One can say that the concept of a game is a concept with blurred edges. – ‘But is a blurred concept a concept at all?’ – Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? It is always an advantage to replace a picture that is not share by one that is? Isn’t one that isn’t sharp often just what we need?”

All this is important because – we need language to communicate. With out it, we are alone.

There’s this sort of conventional wisdom that Democrats “suck at soundbites,” in the words of DailyKos.

And perhaps what’s even more interesting than Democrats being terrible at expressing themselves succinctly is the commonly given reason for this shortcoming –

Liberals want you to understand an issue.

That is to say, liberals care too much about understanding an issue to condense it into a soundbite. They’re too precise, to concerned with the details. Conservatives, on the other hand, have a shaky relationship with the truth and therefore have no qualms with hawking their wares through misrepresentation or lies of omission.

Liberals appeal to reason, conservatives appeal to instinct.

Whoa. Now let’s back up a little bit.

I’ve no interest today in starting a fight about liberal and conservative campaign tactics.

But I am interested in this idea – whether it’s true or not – that Democrats are worse at soundbites because they care too much about understanding an issue.

The statement itself implies that Republican tactics – while perhaps more effective – are somehow less moral, less becoming of a free and democratic society.

And yet that’s the line I hear over and over again in postmortems on candidate or issue campaigns. Or at least one ones we lose.

Well of course we lost. We try to actually explain issues and that doesn’t translate well into a sound bite. There’s no chance for the average voter to understand what we’re trying to say.

Now, being wildly liberal myself, I’m in no position to objectively evaluate the truth in that statement, but what’s interesting is – in itself it is a sort of soundbite. A positioning that Democrats and liberals can rally around.

We’re the smart party. We’re the moral party. We’re the ones who are trying to build an informed society.

And almost by default – the other guys aren’t. They’re the used car salesmen willing to say anything to get you to buy a lemon.

It plays into Democrats’ whole mythos of who they are and what they stand for.

Perhaps this mythos isn’t effective beyond the base of the Democratic party, but it does show that Democrats are fully capable of articulating a single, simple idea that can catch on and become a common conventional wisdom.

…Now if only we could do this more.

I tend to be somewhat old fashioned when it comes to language. I like archaic terms and am slow to pick up the hottest trends.

I have a general dislike of portmanteaus – when I’m not traveling for a vacation, I always correct people who feel comfortable calling that practice a staycation. I won’t use that word.

But I also have a deep appreciation of English as a living language. It is always growing and evolving and changing, and that is wonderful.

Words that are coined spontaneously go on to serve a valuable role in our ability to express ourselves.

Phrases that were once trendy are still appropriate to bust out on particular occasions. I’m never distraught to hear something described as the bee’s knees.

So I’m always interested to see what words and phrases stick with me. And I wonder which ones will survive time. I hope that in 80 years no one even remembers that amazeballs was even a thing.

Lately, I’ve been gravitating toward the half sentences which have emerged as popular.

Maybe it’s because there is 6 feet of snow on the ground, but, I can’t even -

I love that expression. I can’t even.

It so perfectly captures that overwhelmed feeling of confusion coupled with revolution.

I don’t think there was a good expression for that before.

I’m also a fan of phrases such as: no, but really and wait, but, what?

I wouldn’t have guessed those three words would make such a good expression, but it’s a welcome replacement to hold the phone or shut the front door. The more brash version of that former expression is fine with me, but I’d not use it here.

So I wonder if these half-phrases, these sentences which grammatically mean nothing but are filled with cultural context, will survive.

Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but one things for sure – it’s wonderful to be working with a living language.