The edges of language

Language both hands you power and fences you in. There's a Tagalog word, gigil—being so filled with love that you don't know what to do with it, the urge to pinch a baby's cheeks—and English has no word for it at all. Say it in Tagalog and everybody knows exactly what you mean; say it in English and it slips through your fingers.

That's not just a language quirk. Naming the tacit thing is what makes it something you can actually work with—in feelings and in systems both. You can't fix what you can't see, and you can't quite see what you haven't yet found the words for.