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OftenBen  ·  2025 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Holy shit guys. Someone is describing our lives

The thing I'm picking up from the comments is this -

It seems to be a commonly held belief that all the meaningful arrangements of the ways humans can relate to one another en-masse and interpersonally have been defined already. That is to say, there's no possible set of connections that a person can have with other people that can't already be described by existing language.

I think I hold this to some degree. I'm trying to think of genuinely novel arrangements of personal closeness versus distance, physicality/non physicality, romantic/nonromantic, friendly/ antagonistic, etc. And I can't come up with anything new. There's already a label for any type of relationship I care to think of. It's possible that this is a linguistic limitation, not a social-dynamics one. After all, Hindi has all these specific names for different relations, so an element of this phenomenon is definitely a limitation of our words.

In what way does it change a person's worldview to have increased linguistic granularity with regard to social dynamics I wonder?