As the publication date of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) draws nearer, I feel it’s a good time to promote it (obviously) and to introduce some of the problems it uncovers â including common misperceptions I’ve already heard. Through this feedback, I now understand some of the underlying structural limitations that I hadn’t considered, but this only strengthens my position. As I state at the start of the book, the LIH isn’t a cast-in-stone artefact. Other discoveries will inevitably be made. For now, consider it a way to think about the deficiencies of language, around which remediation strategies can be developed.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
Letâs clear the undergrowth first. The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not concerned with everyday ambiguity, garden-variety polysemy, or the sort of misunderstandings that vanish the moment someone bothers to supply five seconds of context. That terrain is already well-mapped, thoroughly fenced, and frankly dull.
Take the classic sort of example wheeled out whenever someone wants to sound clever without doing much work:
‘I made a 30-foot basket’.
Video: a woman making a large basket
If youâre a basketweaver, you picture an absurdly large basket and quietly question the makerâs life choices. If youâre watching basketball, you hear ‘score’. If youâre anywhere near the context in which the sentence was uttered, the meaning is obvious. If it isnât, the repair cost is trivial. Add context, move on, live your life.
Language did not fail here. It merely waited for its coat. This is not the sort of thing the LIH loses sleep over.
The Groucho Marx Defence, or: Syntax Is Not the Problem
Logicians and armchair philosophers love to reach for jokes like Groucho Marxâs immortal line:
‘I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. Why it was wearing my pyjamas, Iâll never know’.
Video: A man and elephant in pyjamas (no sound)
Yes, very funny. Yes, the sentence allows for a syntactic misreading. No, nobody actually believes the elephant was lounging about in striped silk. The humour works precisely because the âwrongâ parse is momentarily entertained and instantly rejected.
Again, language is not insufficient here. Itâs mischievous. Thereâs a difference.
If the LIH were worried about this sort of thing, its ambitions would be indistinguishable from an undergraduate logic textbook with better branding.
Banks, Rivers, and the Myth of Constant Confusion
Likewise, when someone in a city says, ‘I went to the bank’, no sane listener imagines them strolling along a riverbank, unless they are already knee-deep in pastoral fantasy or French tourism brochures. Context does the heavy lifting. It almost always does.
Video: Rare footage of me trying to withdraw funds at my bank (no sound)
This is not a crisis of meaning. This is language functioning exactly as advertised.
Where the Trouble Actually Starts: Contestables
The LIH begins where these tidy examples stop being helpful. It concerns itself with Contestables: terms like truth, freedom, justice, fairness, harm, equality. Words that look stable, behave politely in sentences, and then detonate the moment you ask two people what they actually mean by them. These are not ambiguous in the casual sense. They are structurally contested.
In political, moral, and cultural contexts, different groups use the same word to gesture at fundamentally incompatible conceptual frameworks, all while assuming a shared understanding that does not exist. The conversation proceeds as if there were common ground, when in fact there is only overlap in spelling.
Thatâs why attempts to ‘define’ these terms so often collapse into accusation:
Thatâs not what freedom means. Thatâs not real justice. Youâre redefining truth.
No, the definitions were never shared in the first place. The disagreement was smuggled in with the noun.
‘Just Ignore the Word’ Is Not a Rescue
A common response at this point is to suggest that we simply bypass the troublesome term and discuss the concrete features each party associates with it. Fine. Sensible. Often productive. But notice what this manoeuvre concedes. It does not save the term. It abandons it.
If meaningful discussion can only proceed once the word is set aside and replaced with a list of clarifications, constraints, examples, and exclusions, then the word has already failed at its primary job: conveying shared meaning. This is precisely the point the LIH is making.
The insufficiency is not that language is vague, or flexible, or context-sensitive. Itâs that beyond a certain level of conceptual complexity, language becomes a confidence trick. It gives us the feeling of agreement without the substance, the appearance of communication without the transaction.
At that point, words donât merely underperform. They mislead.
A Sequel to âThe Disorder of Saying Noâ and a Companion to âWhen âAdvancedâ Means Genocideâ
In my previous post, The Disorder of Saying No, I explored the way resistance to authority is pathologised, particularly when that authority is cloaked in benevolence and armed with diagnostic manuals. When one refuses â gently, thoughtfully, or with a sharp polemic â one is no longer principled. One is âdifficult.â Or in my case, oppositional.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
So when I had the gall to call out Bill Maher for his recent linguistic stunt â declaring that a woman is simply âa person who menstruatesâ â I thought I was doing the rational thing: pointing out a classic bit of reductionist nonsense masquerading as clarity. Maher, after all, was not doing biology. He was playing lexicographer-in-chief, defining a term with centuries of philosophical, sociological, and political baggage as though it were a checkbox on a medical form.
I said as much: that he was abusing his platform, presenting himself as the sole arbiter of the English language, and that his little performance was less about clarity and more about controlling the terms of discourse.
My friend, a post-menopausal woman herself, responded not by engaging the argument, but by insinuating â as others have â that I was simply being contrary. Oppositional. Difficult. Again. (She was clearly moved by When “Advanced” Means Genocide, but may have missed the point.)
So let’s unpack this â not to win the debate, but to show what the debate actually is.
This Isnât About Biology â Itâs About Boundary Maintenance
Maherâs statement wasnât intended to clarify. It was intended to exclude. It wasnât some linguistic slip; it was a rhetorical scalpel â one used not to analyse, but to amputate.
And the applause from some cisgender women â particularly those whoâve âgraduatedâ from menstruation â reveals the heart of the matter: itâs not about reproductive biology. Itâs about controlling who gets to claim the termwoman.
it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.
Letâs steelman the argument, just for the sport of it:
Menstruation is a symbolic threshold. Even if one no longer menstruates, having done so places you irrevocably within the category of woman. Itâs not about exclusion; itâs about grounding identity in material experience.
Fine. But now letâs ask:
What about women whoâve never menstruated?
What about intersex people?
What about trans women?
What about cultures with radically different markers of womanhood?
You see, it only works if you pretend the world is simpler than it is.
The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: Applied
This is precisely where the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis earns its keep.
The word woman is not a locked vault. It is a floating signifier, to borrow from Barthes â a term whose meaning is perpetually re-negotiated in use. There is no singular essence to the word. It is not rooted in biology, nor in social role, nor in performance. It is a hybrid, historically contingent construct â and the moment you try to fix its meaning, it slips sideways like a greased Wittgensteinian beetle.
âMeaning is use,â says Wittgenstein, and this is what frightens people.
If woman is defined by use and not by rule, then anyone might claim it. And suddenly, the club is no longer exclusive.
Thatâs the threat Maher and his defenders are really reacting to. Not trans women. Not intersex people. Not language activists or queer theorists.
The threat is ambiguity.
What They Want: A World That Can Be Named
The push for rigid definitions â for menstruation as membership â is a plea for a world that can be named and known. A world where words are secure, stable, and final. Where meaning doesnât leak.
But language doesnât offer that comfort.
It never did.
And when that linguistic instability gets too close to something personal, like gender identity, or the foundation of oneâs own sense of self, the defensive response is to fortify the language, as though building walls around a collapsing church.
Maherâs defenders arenât making scientific arguments. Theyâre waging semantic warfare. If they can hold the definition, they can win the cultural narrative. They can hold the gates to Womanhood and keep the undesirables out.
Thatâs the fantasy.
But language doesnât play along.
Conclusion: Words Will Not Save You â but They Might Soothe the Dead
In the end, Maherâs definition is not merely incorrect. It is insufficient. It cannot accommodate the complexity of lived experience and cannot sustain the illusion of clarity for long.
They are defending nostalgia.
And those who cling to it â friend or stranger, progressive, or conservative â are not defending biology. They are defending nostalgia. Specifically, a pathological nostalgia for a world that no longer exists, and arguably never did: a world where gender roles were static, language was absolute, and womanhood was neatly circumscribed by bodily functions and suburban etiquette.
Ozzy and Harriet loom large here â not as individuals but as archetypes. Icons of a mid-century dream in which everyone knew their place, and deviation was something to be corrected, not celebrated. My friend, of that generation, clings to this fantasy not out of malice but out of a desperate yearning for order. The idea that woman could mean many things, and mean them differently across contexts, is not liberating to her â itâs destabilising.
But that world is gone. And no amount of menstruation-based gatekeeping will restore it.
The Real Scourge Is Ambiguity
Maherâs tantrum wasnât about truth. It was about fear â fear of linguistic drift, of gender flux, of a world in which meaning no longer obeys. The desire to fix the definition of âwomanâ is not a biological impulse. Itâs a theological one.
And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.
And theology, like nostalgia, often makes terrible policy.
This is why your Language Insufficiency Hypothesis matters. Because it reminds us that language does not stabilise reality â it masks its instability. The attempt to define âwomanâ once and for all is not just futile â itâs an act of violence against difference, a linguistic colonisation of lived experience.
So Let Them Rest
Ozzy and Harriet are dead. Let them rest. Let their picket fence moulder. Let their signage decay.
The world has moved on. The language is shifting beneath your feet. And no amount of retroactive gatekeeping can halt that tremor.
The club is burning. And the only thing left to save is honesty.
I question whether reviewing a book chapter by chapter is the best approach. It feels more like a reaction video because I am trying to suss out as I go. Also, I question the integrity and allegiance of the author, a point I often make clear. Perhaps ‘integrity’ is too harsh as he may have integrity relative to his worldview. It just happens to differ from mine.
Chapter 1 of Yuval Noah Harariâs Nexus, ironically titled “What is Information?” closes not with clarity but with ambiguity. Harari, ever the rhetorician, acknowledges the difficulty of achieving consensus on what âinformationâ truly means. Instead of attempting a rigorous definition, he opts for the commonsense idiomatic approachâa conveniently disingenuous choice, given that information is supposedly the bookâs foundational theme. To say this omission is bothersome would be an understatement; it is a glaring oversight in a chapter dedicated to unpacking this very concept.
Audio: Podcast related to this content.
Sidestepping Rigour
Harariâs rationale for leaving âinformationâ undefined appears to rest on its contested nature, yet this does not excuse the absence of his own interpretation. While consensus may indeed be elusive, a book with such grand ambitions demands at least a working definition. Without it, readers are left adrift, navigating a central theme that Harari refuses to anchor. This omission feels particularly egregious when juxtaposed against his argument that information fundamentally underlies everything. How can one build a convincing thesis on such an unstable foundation?
The Map and the Terrain
In typical Harari fashion, the chapter isnât devoid of compelling ideas. He revisits the map-and-terrain analogy, borrowing from Borges to argue that no map can perfectly represent reality. While this metaphor is apt for exploring the limitations of knowledge, it falters when Harari insists on the existence of an underlying, universal truth. His examplesâIsraeli versus Palestinian perspectives, Orthodox versus secular vantage pointsâhighlight the relativity of interpretation. Yet he clings to the Modernist belief that events have an objective reality: they occur at specific times, dates, and places, regardless of perspective. This insistence feels like an ontological claim awkwardly shoehorned into an epistemological discussion.
Leveraging Ambiguity
One canât help but suspect that Harariâs refusal to define âinformationâ serves a rhetorical purpose. By leaving the concept malleable, he gains the flexibility to adapt its meaning to suit his arguments throughout the book. This ambiguity may prove advantageous in bolstering a wide-ranging thesis, but it also risks undermining the bookâs intellectual integrity. Readers may find themselves wondering whether Harari is exploring complexity or exploiting it.
Final Thoughts on Chapter 1
The chapter raises more questions than it answers, not least of which is whether Harari intends to address these foundational gaps in later chapters. If the preface hinted at reductionism, Chapter 1 confirms it, with Harariâs Modernist leanings and rhetorical manoeuvres taking centre stage. “What is Information?” may be a provocative title, but its contents suggest that the question is one Harari is not prepared to answerâat least, not yet.
Philosophics 