How to Speak Articulately

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that a century ago, and it may be one of the most quietly devastating sentences in philosophy. Being articulate is not about big words. It is clear thinking, made audible. In this video we build it from the ground up, with Cato the Elder, Aristotle, Pascal, Zeno and Seneca: know your point, give it a spine, cut the filler, use silence, grow your vocabulary, listen, and think before you speak. It ends with a thirty-day practice you can start today. 0:00 The limits of my world 0:37 What being articulate is not 0:54 Cato: grasp the subject 1:37 Point, reason, example, point 1:55 Aristotle: clarity comes first 2:25 Ordinary words, extraordinary precision 2:57 Pascal: say less 3:36 Hedges 4:06 Silence 4:39 Slow down 4:56 Vocabulary: the boundary of your world 5:44 Zeno: two ears and one mouth 6:22 As a man lives, so he speaks 7:02 What to do, starting today 7:38 Thirty days SOURCES Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6 · Cato the Elder, "Rem tene, verba sequentur" (preserved by Julius Victor, Ars Rhetorica) · Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book III, ch. 2 · Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales, Letter 16 (1657) · Zeno of Citium, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.23 · Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 114 ARTWORK Paintings, prints and sculpture from the public domain and open-access museum collections (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum, J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art, Mauritshuis and others). Bust of Zeno of Citium (National Archaeological Museum, Naples): photo by Jeremy Weate, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of Socrates (Louvre): photo by Derek Key, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Fra Angelico, Saint Peter Martyr Enjoining Silence (San Marco, Florence): photo by Dimitris Kamaras, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Ingres, Louis-François Bertin (1832, Louvre): photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. An