Rightly or wrongly, I have always felt that I had a reasonably good vocabulary (although sometimes when playing Scrabble I have some doubts). There are good reasons why I should have a good vocabulary:
- I took several years of Latin in school and, as a result, I find that I often have as sense of what a word means even though I may not exactly know its meaning.
- I have always read a lot.
- I was fortunate enough to be able to attend university.
- As a lawyer, I had to work with words (although the words could be archaic and stilted) throughout my professional career.
However, good vocabulary or not, there are some words which I struggle to understand or to use. In fact, my mind struggles to even remember this group of words. Much like a secret society I know this group exists but I don’t know who its members are until one of them appears in my reading and I realize that I do not understand its meaning or how it is being used.
The word “existential” is one of these words. Yesterday, I watched a YouTube video entitled “Disruption, Democracy & the Global Order – Yuval Noah Harari at the University of Cambridge”. This was a presentation by Yuval Noah Harari and a panel discussion hosted by the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Yuval Noah Harari is a well-known Israeli historian and the author of the bestselling book “Sapiens”. Despite the presence of the word “existential” in the Youtube notes, I watched this video because I admire Mr. Harari after reading his book and watching other presentations by him.
In this Youtube presentation Harari described three threats to continued human existence: climate change, artificial intelligence and global war. The analysis by Harari and the panel discussions made the nature and extent of these three threats very clear. It would be easy to feel very pessimistic about the future for humans after watching this video. But, there also seemed to be some reason for hope. The discussions between Mr. Harari and the panel seemed to suggest that the narratives that humans tell themselves drive much of human behavior. The discussion also seemed to suggest that working together (a unique strength of our species) humans could with effort (including the use of art and story telling) change the narratives so that these three threats could be addressed. I found this video to be easy to watch, informative and inspirational. I would recommend it to friends and family.
The word “existential” was used so often in this video that I began to feel more comfortable with it and to feel that I understood it and might use it myself. This morning I decided to use the internet to confirm that I did indeed understand the meaning of “existential” . By the time I finished looking at the definition of the word and the many responses to my google searches on the word, two things were clear to me. First, it was clear that my understanding of the word was not complete and, secondly, I am not sure that the word is used properly by many others. So, while today the word “existential” is at the front of my mind as I mull over Harari’s presentation, I can see that it could easily be recalled to a meeting of the secret society to which it belongs and disappear again.