How do you feel? Fine.
Yes, how do you feel, fine; and yet we have thousands and thousands of words about rugs, and widgets, and this and that, so we need to create a much richer language of emotion. There are times—and this would be a great study for somebody to do—there have been periods in English when there were emotions that don’t exist anymore. This is getting very close to this business of how reality is made by language.
Can we recover a lost emotion by creating a word for it? There are colors that don’t exist anymore because the words have been lost. I’m thinking of the word ‘jacinth’. This is a certain kind of orange. Once you know the word ‘jacinth’, you can always recognize it, but if you don’t have it, all you can say is it’s a little darker orange than something else.
We’ve never tried to consciously evolve our language, we’ve just let it evolve, but now we have this level of awareness, and this level of cultural need where we really must plan where the new words should be generated.There are areas where words should be gotten rid of that empower political wrong thinking. The propagandists for the fascists already understand this; they understand that if you make something unsayable, you’ve made it unthinkable. So it doesn’t plague you anymore. So planned evolution of language is the way to speed it toward expressing the frontier of consciousness.
Terence McKenna in conversation with Rebecca McClem in Critique Magazine, reprinted in The Archaic Revival (pg 214, 1991)
