Have you ever looked at the state of the world—the climate crisis, the social inequality, the fact that a lettuce recently outlasted a British Prime Minister—and thought, "Man, this is properly forked"?

Well, over my Christmas holiday (when I should have been eating ham and ignoring my emails), I went down a research rabbit hole so deep I nearly bumped into Alice. And I found out something terrifying: we actually are forked. But not in the way you think. It’s not just our politics or our economics that are broken. It’s our words.

We are trying to run a complex, living, breathing planet using a linguistic operating system designed for a steam engine.

The Semantic Commons

Long before the world was mapped out by fences and property deeds, human language operated in a state of deep connection. Words were rich, alive, and packed with multiple layers of meaning all at once. For example, the old words for "spirit" also meant "wind" and "breath" as a single, unbroken concept. There was no hard line dividing the person speaking from the world they were speaking about.

Meaning was held in a shared space where everything was interconnected, a way of speaking based on relationship and life. But between the years 1620 and 1700, a deliberate restructuring took place in England that completely changed how the Western world communicates. In my research I’ve called this The Great Semantic Enclosure.

What Happened and Why?

Just like the historical land laws that put physical fences around common fields to turn them into private property, a group of powerful intellectuals decided to put mental fences around the English language. They intentionally stripped words of their emotional depth, spiritual presence, and relational ties.