Let's talk about nominalizations.

Yay Linguistics! (said nobody ever...)
1/

What's a nominalization?

Well it's when you turn a non-noun word into a noun.

Like "requirement." This actually comes from a verb (to require) and we just like ret-con that sucker into a noun.

So why do we care?
2/

Well, these nominalizations have a way of confounding us since they act like 'things' but aren't really 'things.'

Let's take a word like "safety." Safety isn't really a thing.

It comes from an adverb (safe) and so the origin of the concept is like "I want to feel safe."
3/

But if instead I say "I'm worried about my safety" we *kind of* have a similar semantic value here, except we've gone from

"I desire to experience a somewhat subjective state"

to

"I'm focused on the sufficiency of an abstraction."

Which is like... odd.
4/

These nominalizations are a bit less actionable - if we are talking about "safety at school," for example, we are now using a rhetorical form that implies objectivity.

Yet is a derivative of a subjective, experiential state.

And this causes many problems.
5/

In fact it's the sort of thing untrained couch philosophers spend a lot of time talking about.

"What is Safety?"
"What is Freedom?"
"What is Liberty?"

They're nothing, you nitwits - just linguistic artifacts that you keep stubbing your toe on.
6/

I'd say like half of what shrinks do is just unwinding people's internal mental framework to unbind nominalizations from concepts they have been lexically indexed to so that they are capable of thought again (note: the other half of the job seems hard).

Anyhow, I digress.
7/

Most of the stuff everyone is so bent around the axle about with finance is also like half nominalization-derived.

Inflation/deflation, of course. Various bits of the Fed's clerical activity.

Oh - and a "store of value."

Because that phrase is a double nominalization.
8/

"I store potatoes in the pantry to eat them a week or two later." That makes sense.

"My pantry is an excellent store of potatoes." Eh... I mean... is it?

For how long? How many potatoes can it hold? How does it compare to other stores of potatoes?
9/

You see the minute you nominalize something that's not really a noun, you're in trouble.

Because since it's *not* a noun, it means something different to everyone based on how they've indexed it inside their head.

And so we talk past one another.
10/

Because we're each projecting onto that non-noun thing whatever properties we have (personally) assigned it.

This is harder to do with real nouns. It's hard to just give arbitrary properties to, say, a grape. People will call you down pretty fast.
11/

But if it's something like "freedom" you can just talk about what freedom means to you personally for hours and write slam poetry about it and everyone will clap when you're done.

Denominalizing things can help.

"I feel more free to eat edibles in Colorado vs New York."
12/

What about a Store of Value™?

Well... we'd need to know how long we're storing it (duration) how much "it" there is (quantity) who needs to value it once the storage period expires (counter party) what options we have for un-storing it along the way (liquidity)...
13/

Oh well - would you look at that!

Turns out once we denominalize "Store of Value" and start examining its properties, it looks a lot like...

...well, just a normal old trade, really.


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