Temporada 3 · Espasmos del Fin · JVV-T3-29
Tumoral languages
I Uncoupled growth
A tumour is not an invader. It is your own tissue, which forgot when to stop.
The distinction changes the question. If a language falls ill, there is no point hunting for the foreigner corrupting it: the point is to find which internal mechanism stopped receiving the stop signal.
A word turns tumoral when its rate of reproduction stops depending on whether it says anything. Solution. Ecosystem. Experience. Curated. Impact. None of them is false. That is the problem: they are unfalsifiable. Nobody can be wrong using them, and so nobody stops.
“Healthy tissue stops when it touches its neighbour. The tumour has no neighbours: it has room.”
II Three scales
In a meeting, it produces half an hour nobody could summarise.
In an industry, it produces a vocabulary in which two competitors describe opposite products with the same twelve words.
In a whole language, it produces the terminal condition: the most reproduced terms are exactly the least specifiable.
III Table of proliferation
| Phase | Symptom | Measure | Reversible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyperplasia | the word repeats, it still means something | 3-5 appearances per page | yes |
| Dysplasia | it means something different in every use | 2 incompatible senses | with effort |
| Carcinoma in situ | it means anything at all inside its guild | 0 semantic restrictions | barely |
| Metastasis | it colonises other guilds | it appears in 4+ industries | no |
Synergy completed the cycle in eleven years. Curated did it in three. Narrative has sat between dysplasia and carcinoma since 2019 and nobody has proposed a biopsy. The lexicon accelerates faster than the capital that produces it: a word now takes 38 months to become illegible, against 140 in 1990.
The hypothesis is simple and unpleasant. The cheaper it is to reproduce a text, the less it costs for it to mean nothing — and the marginal cost of writing hit zero four years ago.
IV Diagnostic test (safe)
Take any sentence from your own work. Replace every abstract noun with its opposite.
We are looking for high-impact solutions → We are looking for low-impact problems.
If the inverted sentence also sounds acceptable in your industry, you did not write a claim. You grew tissue.
There is no risk in the exercise beyond recognising yourself. It is done in silence, on paper, and you need tell nobody.
V Risks of the metaphor
Calling a word a tumour carries an obvious danger: it invites cleansing, and every linguistic cleansing ends in policing.
Biology is no help here. An organism can excise; a language cannot. What is forbidden gets said better, and what is declared diseased becomes the identity of whoever says it.
The difference is the scale of intervention. A tumour is operated on. A language is only spoken differently, one speaker at a time, with no campaign.
VI What cannot be concluded
One question stays open, and closing it would be exactly the error this text describes.
If proliferation with no meaning is the mechanism, and if the mechanism is internal, and if nobody can point from outside at which word fell ill because the pointing is language too:
how do you tell, right now, in this sentence, whether what you have just read explained something or only grew?