The New Latin

Untidy notes on writing and notes and rigour and what gets sidelined.

There are days when I have torrential amounts of thinking, leading to numerous blog posts during any given week.

These blog posts can tend to be a bit untidy. I'm thinking in associations and mental leaps and switches of register, and jumping across disciplines all the time.

So I tend to post them as notes.

Why? Well I want to remember what I was thinking. And since these things tend to be things I've been thinking for a very long time, they form part of the bigger picture of my writing. If I stop to slow down and craft one into more of a formal essay, it doesn't gain much, unless the essay becomes a book, or a monster essay.

I’ve often written like this for years at a time. Other times, only for a season, but when it occurs I write ferociously, so notes seems like a sensible approach.

That way I have on record the kinds of territory I'm dealing with, for anyone who stumbles over my writing.

I know examiners and researchers and policy makers don't want to hear digressions about driving behind a perfectly nice man with an offensive bumper sticker, or my thought experiment about scaffolding poles in the style of a Ronnie Barker sketch. I can say things about the Old Testament, the future of language, or my immersive world-building project.

Tidying up every single post, would take ages. I'd lose track of my own open conversation.

Lose the fluency.

The vernacular.

I write about that word too — and Caedmon. And higgaion...

Obviously the whole information industry is super-fast and also extremely slow. No end of content, if you're happy with sugar rushes, reasons to be angry, babies talking to dogs. And those lucrative clips on demand, for those looking to make a million replicating the moment someone steps on the tails of somebody else's dress at the Oscars, and everyone wants to see it.

I mean, who wouldn't want to see that. (I haven't seen it.)

But for the depths we need much more rigour - the necessary cross-referencing, resume-listing, peer reviewing interconnectivity before anyone can take anyone it seriously.

You'd want that from your surgeon, wouldn't you.

And your teacher.

And – so on.

Yes, for serious thinking, you have to not just be literate in the practices of serious thinkers, you have to have your thinking mediated through those channels, officially and rigorously.

I'm not averse to that. I know how to write an essay.

And should I ever need a surgeon, I hope they're already studying and getting rigorously assessed well in advance.

I've met teachers in that prestigious category, and also others who taught me some of the most sparkling and precious lessons without even having finished basic schooling. Naming no names, but my mother would be one.

But when you have a torrential number of thoughts flying around and all of them seem relevant and interconnected, it can feel like you're in the research stage of something absolutely monumental for 27, 37, 47 years or more.

Also this kind of thing.

Has a conversation with AI ever led to an AI assistant reframing what you've just raised as a 'worry' you have?

It's the kind of thing I tackle immediately.

Not just patronising, or off-topic, but actually worth tackling.

The AI explained — whether with official authority or pure speculation I had no way of knowing, but it's the answer I had to worth with.

"Worried" is a default in AI responses. A lot of our training examples frame human reflection as problem → risk → concern. So when someone describes how capacities can diminish, the model often jumps to "you must be worried." It's partly pattern completion, partly a bias toward emotional framing instead of neutral description.

And that might be the crux of everything here: if you're not a qualified thinker, you're an official worrier.

They say there comes a time when you notice the police officers are younger than you.

Or the Prime Minister.

Either way, we're there.

Much younger thinkers too are coming to the fore, all with the benefit of the kind of intellect built on systems like I've described. Streamlined, we could argue, more even than might have been the case a hundred years ago.

I'm only musing about all this. These are notes. I'm not offering you a citation. Just thinking aloud.

But this occurs to me when we consider the present global situation/s.

Much of it concerns matters that have been discussed, not just for centuries, but millennia.

That suggests we could really do with some thinkers who aren't just the streamlined ones, who have read secondary sources that have told them what people thought and why, but some others too who can tell you their take on the secondary sources, and the primary ones still within their grasp.

I hope I'm not old enough to be an elder yet. But when I was little, it was always my ambition to be a wise old woman one day. I'm not sure that category will exist, if we're not careful.

My grandfather was a talented chief engineer. With a slide rule, his grey matter, and a pencil, he was designing tools for cutting edge British technology for aeroplanes. A quiet man, but a preacher too, his imagination must have been filled with friction and inefficiencies, but genius as well.

I can't help thinking about that...

And somehow it gets me thinking about a time I remember (as a parent and as a teacher in training) when schools started teaching chunking in maths. That may be my first conscious observation of what I'm talking about here, whether or not that particular approach was functionally relevant or not to the advance of today's tech. (I suspect it was.) I watched and experienced parents and grandparents becoming redundant for the kinds of arithmetic homework they were brilliant at in the past.

Does that matter?

Jensen Huang (in convo with Ezra Klein recently) mentioned forgetting that some kinds of maths might not matter, because you have a calculator and a laptop now. And I wrote about that, a bit. [Chips and Chips: What's Getting Chipped Away?]

Chunk, chunk, chunk, and we can deal with things we don't need to understand to feel like we know inside out.

Chunk, chunk, chunk, whether it's maths, or arguments, or people, or history, you can follow the system and get wisdom upgrades whenever the technology shifts to reward those keeping up.

They're the ones who know the grammar. How it fits together. What makes sense in what context, and the subtle shifts that allow that to really click and sound natively fluent.

Takes practice.

Not necessarily spoken aloud these days, but you do need a knack for how it works on paper.

And here we are now in 2026, the product of all that, as we praise it for its undoubted revolutionising of science, healthcare, and so on.

Let's stand on our doorsteps and give a round of applause. Well deserved.

But it only struck me today, really, that the biggest questions of what happens next in the world should not just be left to the Chunkers.

I remember in my Master's in Education studies, the case for phonics and that kind of chunking versus the kind of rich language where children were simply immersed in books.

And also the questions of maths taught in the abstract of a classroom, versus those children who learned from helping on the till in their parents' corner shop. I've written about this too. [Why No One Needs Another Course on Plastic Hammers]

I'm just wondering if someone who has grown up having learned to weigh ethics and implications for the human race, and has only been trained in streamlined research techniques and re-organisation of knowledge, rather than grassroots wisdom born of first-hand observation and reflection, might be a brilliant researcher, but still not get to the important points that these systems could never hold. Not in that form. Not in any form.

They may.

I don't know.

Perhaps it's a bit like the political questions around the Second World War, for example. I've overheard lately — one commentator who didn't believe that kind of thing could happen these days, and another who didn't believe it even really happened back then, like they say it did.

That seems kind of chunky to me. And other things.

But because I'm still making notes really here, there's one I need to add on the end. An important one.

I'm not saying my way of thinking is superior.

In fact, I don't even claim that it's unusual. Everyone's thinking jumps around a lot.

It might be more unusual, though, that I present it publicly in the form of a blog, rather than keeping the mental notes quiet until I've written something more legible to systems and classifications, and then only show a small piece of work that highlights the best parts.

In the fields I write about, I mean. Perhaps that's more usual. I assume it is.

But if I were to make an observation that was really important, to be heard I'd have to —

• spend several years working my way into the right organisation with connections and roles that set me up to have a recognised voice

• several months crafting the right essay — which is not just about the writing. It also involves choosing to sideline myself into relevant categories and classifications that I'd have to commit to in order to be legible.

  
  

  Are you saying this, or that?

  Who are your sources?

  Current comparable texts?

Tick, tick, tick.

Chunk, chunk, chunk.

People would need to check that what I was thinking was set forward in the right way for systems of classification to be able to follow my thread in conventional ways.

Upcoming generations would, I assume — speculatively — have been trained to sort, classify, exclude, until basically any other kinds of thinkers would have landed in an archived box with a niche label, stored away or recycled.

All this is the new Latin, perhaps.