Hi Reader,

Everything is an interesting word.

I love that sentence. I don't know many sentences that can be interpreted two drastically different ways like this. (Send me your candidates, though.)

In this case, the different interpretations are themselves interesting. Let's look closer, with a little help from some punctuational expressiveness.

"Everything" is an interesting word. This is clearly referring to the interestingness of the word "everything." And it IS an interesting word! In fact, it's the main thing that makes this dually interpretable sentence interesting. More on that in a bit, but first the other interpretation:

Everything is an interesting word. This is nearly nonsense, since in this sentence everything is not an attempt at a word. Instead, it's an idea: that of all things, collectively.

If that's not clear yet, try a simpler version of it, where the apparently mixed-up grammar is more obvious: "trees are an interesting word." See? Trees aren't a word; they're trees. Similarly, everything isn't a word; it's everything.

Read this way—everything is an interesting word—is saying this thing that's not even a word is actually an interesting word.

(If you're thinking of getting off the train at this stop, I totally understand. This kind of thing drives me bonkers, too. But I really am trying to make a point. Actually a couple of them.)

The more whimsical point is this: what if trees don't exist? What if the idea we try to encapsulate when using the word "trees" doesn't actually refer to something that exists, but only to the idea itself? What if all these category words we use are ultimately self-referential, and the apparently nonsense sentence is actually just an illusion? Everything is an interesting word. First it sounds like nonsense. On closer inspection it's even less than nonsense: not only is everything NOT an interesting word, but actually everything is ONLY a word, and doesn't exist at all in reality. Maybe it would be more accurate to say everything is nothing.

(If that ended up sounding like a ridiculous word game, I promise you it's solely because of my lack of skill in describing it.)

The more useful point is this: "everything" is a word that has two flavors, singular and plural. Singular everything is the unified collective of all things. You know, what Sagan was getting at when he said "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." And what I was trying to get at in my newsletter a few weeks ago when I was talking about how gravity isn't a meaningfully separate phenomenon from anything else. On the contrary, it depends on everything else, and everything depends on it. The whole... well, everything, is arising all at once, together.

But, wait! Do you see what I did there? How can a singular unified everything be considered to be "together?" More nonsense?

No! It's because of the plural flavor of "everything," by which I mean "all individual things, together." Because it's even more obvious (if that's possible) that there are LOTS of individual things in existence. There's this T key on my keyboard as a meaningfully distinct thing from this Y key. There's this pen I could be using to write this newsletter in ink on paper instead of in bits on my computer. There's this other monitor over here that becomes extremely tempting to look at when my writing hits an awkward spot that requires some emotional effort to move through.

Yes, obviously everything is lots of stuff. But, also, everything is one thing. Plural, and singular. Together.

Everything is an interesting word is doing what language does: it's being specifically vague. It lets us move back and forth between the singular referent and the plural one, even in the middle of a single sentence, without being clear to either ourselves or our listeners what we're referring to.

Now THAT's interesting. When I really contemplate this stuff, I'm dumbfounded that communication works at all. Language is serious magic.

Next week, I'll share what all this nonsensible sense has to do with the name of God.