Words That Were Taken
How vocabulary narrowing created a species that cannot name its own experience — and defers to anyone who seems to have the words.
Sanskrit has 96 words for love. Greek had 8. English has 1.
Each dot below represents one word. Feel the gap.
The Mechanism
Vocabulary loss → Perception loss → Authority dependency. When you cannot name what you are experiencing, you defer to whoever seems to have the words for it. This is not metaphor. It is observable linguistics. The language was narrowed across four historical phases — and each phase produced a more manageable population.
Four phases. Seventeen centuries. The same mechanism each time: restrict the vocabulary, control the perception.
10 words that used to mean something powerful — and what they were reduced to.