Here are some short words about some things I like to think about. I made it with the ten hundred most used words.

Ragnar the dog lies on a bed

I care about some big questions:

  1. How do words get to say what they say?
  2. How do words even get to say anything at all?
  3. When are we just saying the same things with different words?

Sometimes I ask these questions about normal words, like ‘dog’, or ‘bed’, or whatever. Sometimes I ask the same questions about less normal words, like ‘whole number’, or ‘real number’, or ‘power set’. Either way, the questions are really hard. To deal with them, I can’t just think about the words, or what they’re meant to be about; I also have to think about what we are like. So I also have to ask:

  1. What is the self?

And that’s another weird question.