A couple of guys liked to “horse around,” in the way that rowdy friends will, and they would often grab each other boyishly and wrestle. Even though they were not the same size, they wrestled evenly because of their match in strength, reflexes, balance, and quickness. These jousts always bounced around in good fun, but then they would always collapse in an instant when one of the guys popped a trick from his grab bag: with a deft snap to the solar plexus, or a practiced crunch of the wrist, or a backwards twist on a finger – the other would drop like a puppy akimbo… One spoke “the language,” and the other didn’t.

 Bob Cousy, Earl Monroe, Julius Erving and Michael Jordan each in turn stretched the game of basketball, so that the  game now appears as a different sport compared to the gravity-based, set-shot game of the 1950’s.

Frank Lloyd Wright used the same grab-bag as everyone else –  masonry, steel, glass and wood – but with the same alphabet he scripted a new language of line and space.

Albert Einstein also used the same alphabet as his cohorts – really, it was nearly nothing: just numbers manipulated on a page; and with these simple scratchings accessible to any of his peers, he described a relative universe with which humanity is still now becoming conversant.

 Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say and John Maynard Keynes were not even real businessmen. All they did was think about the flow of money as if it were a liquid torrent to be modulated, and their writings helped shape, form and temper a burgeoning world-wide wealth abstracted from the far more volatile world of simple mining, agriculture and animal husbandry. A new vocabulary of capitalism issued from their work, and today this vocabulary acts as conduit for the billions that flow between markets.

 In every realm of human activity, vocabulary acts as a conduit, lending form and direction to turbulent conveyance in every medium – art and science, athletics and politics, economics and philosophy and architecture. But each of these laminated vocabularies is also a dynamic, shimmering curtain that wobbles and shimmies like a translucent window to the beyond, the unarticulated, the unknown.

 Learn the vocabulary so that you may reach through it to the unnamed beyond, and thereby  enrich the walls that serve you so well.