MY Keywords
(workspace for explications of)

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Epigram

The everyday meaning and the etymological meaning of a word
can teach us nothing about ourselves,
since they represent the collective part of language,
which was made for all people and not for each of us individually.

By dissecting the words we like, without bothering about conforming
either to their etymologies or to their accepted signification,
we discover their more hidden qualities and the secret ramifications
that are propagated through the whole language,
channeled by associations of sounds, forms, and ideas.
Then language changes into an oracle,
and there we have a thread (however slender it may be)
to guide us through the Babel of our minds.

Michel Leiris Brisées pg 5 (1925)

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A collection of words and phrases that seem central to MY purview

[the breadth of one's influence or concerns;
ambit, compass, orbit, range, reach, scope;
the limit of someone's responsibility, interest, or activity;
an area within which someone or something has authority, influence, or knowledge of the world,
a palette that grows, interweaves, and attracts new members]
...

Some of MY Keywords have a long history in my personal lexicon; some are recently added as I recognized their salience; some are (or were) foundational, and all could/should spawn Essays in the Montaigne model; and some are sudden revelations/realizations of deeper significance.

MY Keywords are examples/instances whose internal workings (meanings, connections to other words and ideas, nuances, developmental histories) seem to me essential in my own Story of what I do, what I've done, where my curiosities have taken me. Many of those listed below seem pivot points. bearings in my own succession of focuses of interest and exploration.

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...if the history of algorithm teaches us anything, then it teaches that
words are freighted with historical traces
for which, and even despite the endeavors of the key-words project,
there may be no adequate inventory.

Ted Striphas Algorithmic Culture (239)

What's important here aren't the specific categories but
the importance of the multidimensional space underlying them

Stephen Downes at downes.ca

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Below I list provisional candidates and set out to explore their semantic spaces,
but the work of turning the list into a detailed mapping of the territory of personal significance
is a challenging project, here updated to 8i26:

affordance
algorithm
anthropo-
apotheosis
bellwether
biblio-
bricolage
cohort
creativity
Culture
curate
cyber-
denote
Development
dynamic
Ecology
emergence
explication
Form
hyper-
Image
Imagination
ineffable
Information
infrastructure
(con)juncture
landscape
lexicon
macramé
map (v. and n.)
mashup
Meaning
meme
meta-
Mind
Narrative
nexus/nexial
paradigm
parlance
parse
Pattern
phyto-
portentous
process
quixotic
region
salience
Semantics
Serendipity
signification
Story
Surreal
synoptic
Systems
technē
trajectory
verisimilitude
vernacular
wetware
whimsy
Zeitgeist

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Bound Phrases
Toothsome Phrases
'world model'
'semantic field'
'social media'
'artificial intelligence'
'modern life'
'guilty pleasures'
'octogenarian [w-]reckoning'
'Whole Earth'
(and many more...)

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See further mappings and imbrications of MYKeywords

MYKeywords as seen by Firefox, 2i26