Word Choice, Vector Spaces, and Charm Bracelets

Word Choice

I’ve heard that words are the bricks of language. This clearly implies that words are fundamental to language, but more subtly also implies that words are not individually valuable. Bricks and words are collective entities, ie, we consider diction and architectural materials, but do not pore over individual bricks or words. However, Merriam-Webster’s video series Word Choice made me reconsider the brick analogy. In the short series (which I have watched far too many times), a number of authors and creators, including Gabrielle Zevin and Celeste Ng, talk about why they chose to use certain words in their works. And most fascinating of all, they look through the other words they were thinking of, tell us why they eliminated them and how they came to the right word, showcasing how the right word makes the sentence ring like no other word can.

Rather than bricks, these artists evaluate words like charms on a charm bracelet. Each charm or word is evaluated as an individual entity apart from what it can contribute to the collective- broadly terms of form, function and evocation. The function of a word is clear enough in theory- conveying a certain meaning.
Form is murkier. A clipped word to make the sentence rhythmic. A gargantuan one to spice up a plain sentence. A dainty fricative to evoke a pause, reflection. A drawn-out nasal to satisfy and focus.
But evocation is the murkiest of all. And in the following section, I attempt to present my definition of evocation.

Evocation and Vector Spaces

To discuss evocation, I like to think of words as a vector space, a computational linguistics concept where words are placed in an infinite n-dimensional grid.

The distance between words approximates the strength of the association between words, ie the closer two words are placed, the more closely they are associated, both in meaning. For example scarlet and crimson, would be closer than scarlet and navy reflecting that the first are shades of red. But also, red is also closer to passion than calm, reflecting that red is canonically the colour of powerful feelings love or anger.

To use a word, to “tug” at it in its position in the vector space, is not only to set it into motion, but set into motion all the words near it in the vector space.
The closest words are most strongly set into motion, ie, calling scarlet evokes love and crimson. However the effects are dampened the further away the word is from the original word. Thus calling scarlet evokes passion more strongly than espionage. To reiterate, evocation is the lexical resonance wherein to call upon a word is to also to call upon the words that closely surround it in the vector space.

Instinct, Evocation and Art

Words don’t come with evocations pre-installed. Instead, we’re programmed with evocations, from our first nursery rhymes and picture books and (potentially TikTok’s?) these days. The rose in the Beauty and the Beast movie is a beautiful countdown, a symbol of the fleeting time Belle and the Beast have together before the curse falls. Sleeping Beauty is the Briar Rose, an epithet that conveys both the tragedy of her tale, and the beauty of her tragedy.

Because of barrage of association we face from birth, we’re so highly attuned to the grammar of stories, and the grammar of story-telling mediums like books and movies.
Stories, books and movies though nominally in English, or Bengali, or French, speak a much more subtle language, a language of symbols, a language that taps into our deep-rooted understanding of the nets of evocations. We instinctively understand that the little girl in the red coat among the greys of Schindler’s list is a symbol of love and hope among bleakness and death. We also instinctively know that the blood-scented white rose that President Snow wears in the Hunger Games is a symbol of corrupted beauty, grandeur built on cruel foundations.

Though this language is something we take for granted, it is vital we emphasise how powerful, and how strange and powerful it is.

It’s not a language most people who don’t create art have an opportunity to speak , yet everyone, artist and non-artist alike, understands it. It’s told through channels as diverse as colour and camera-angle, gesture and texture. But it expresses the most contradictory emotions, the strangest tensions, the faintest nuances.

And this language of evocation is at its most potent when there is a specific context.

The Neologism and the Cliche

Context heightens evocation. Within a specific context, a genre, an aesthetic, say fairy tale, evocative meanings become narrower, more potent. Furthermore, in context, different words pull different evocative weights.
For example, flowers as a whole are a shorthand for love in everyday life.
In a fairy tale context, however, a rose is a rose is a symbol of tortured love and transient beauty. Meanwhile the marigold is a mere flower, a blank slate, doesn’t tug any memories or emotions. Within a specific context/genre, some words come established with associations and expectations, and others are simply empty canvases.

Thus, roses are used most powerfully within the fairy-tale context, from the iconic rose in the jar in Beauty and the Beast to Roja’s garden in Blanca and Roja (a fascinating modern foretelling of the relatively obscure fairy tale Rose Red and Snow White)

However, precisely because a rose is so weighted down with expectation they sometimes fall flat. As Kvothe remarks after hearing his patr
on tell his fiancée “Only roses for you”, roses are utterly cliched. Cliches are dismissed as unevocative. However, cliches are bland precisely because they are so evocative. They
leave no room for interpretation because they are over-stuffed with pre-existing evocations. Whereas the unweighted word, the word that’s relatively unfamiliar in context, allows one to turn the most interesting phrases, even if their excess is odd, and disjointed.
The best writing, I feel, is the marriage of the established word and the new term on the block.
On the best charm bracelets the moon and the stars clink alongside a squid tentacles and Mandelbrot set.

(Tangential) Note: The Modern Aesthetic and the Evocation:

I Thinking about the overlap between the aesthetic and the evocation.
An aesthetic, in its contemporary meaning, is best exemplified by #glamcore (faux fur and fake nails) and #Y2Kcore boards on Pinterest. The boards are strikingly appealing and strikingly shallow, just like the modern concept of the aesthetic, something we can’t define, but undeniably know. The glut of images these keywords summon are of different people, different objects and different places, all seemingly tied together by an invisible thread, all evoking the same response. An aesthetic is drawing a loose boundary in the vector space. It is roughly bundling a few evocations together- and then putting a stamp on it.