(2025-01-09) Writing Slowly Improve Your Notes And Your Life With Two Word Phrases

WritingSlowly: Improve your notes (and your life) with two-word phrases. Since my notes are mainly modular, it’s fairly easy to connect two seemingly separate ideas or concepts to create a new one. I’m intrigued by how important this activity of recombination has been in the history of innovation. (collage, remix)

As I’ve said before, from fragments you can build a greater whole.

A phrase made only of two juxtaposed words, like ‘flight simulator’, can be a remarkably evocative thing. Choose the right two words and as if by magic(k), you’ve created a memorable phrase, a new brand, or even the kernel of an innovative technology. (meme)

In the social sciences they have been termed "sensitizing concepts" - which itself is a kind of two-word brand. When they’re working well, such phrases don’t really define something, rather they evoke it

• Over fifty years ago, Herbert Blumer introduced the evocative idea of “sensitizing concept.” “Sensitizing concepts” emerge when the observer discovers something worth problematizing, “addressing” the concept to the objects of investigation, producing precise and accurate evidence of chosen phenomena. He discusses how “sensitizing concepts” (1954) may be “attached” to events in the empirical world, suggesting “exploration” and “inspection” as the tools to deploy in the attachment process (1956; 1969). But he leaves the issue of how “sensitizing concepts” actually become aligned with evidence and proof unanswered.

Once you’ve seen a concept like ‘social class’ or ‘cultural norm’, your whole world shifts slightly and it’s hard to un-see it.

Think, too, of some more recent examples, such as ‘tipping point’, ‘bowling alone’, ‘shock doctrine’, ‘atomic habits’

In the world of business, the two-word phrase dominates. Think of Home Depot, Mastercard, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, FaceBook, Instagram, Bitcoin or even that parody two word brand, TikTok

I’d go so far as to suggest that for any idea to gain an audience it could benefit from the two word treatment.

This ubiquity not only helps with promoting your bright idea, it also helps to show how to discover your bright idea in the first place.

Mostly this won’t work, but sometimes, just sometimes, it will.

you have to choose the right two words. Who ever heard of a car depot, a car stack or a car field? No, it’s obviously a car park.