In this week’s Futures story, Felicia Davin’s love of language is given free rein: Neuraugment, verb looks at the possible pitfalls of neural augmentation courtesy of a dictionary. You can find out more about Felicia’s work on Twitter and Tumblr. Here she kindly explains how her Futures story came about — as ever it pays to read the story first.

 Writing Neuraugment, verb

I spend a lot of time with dictionaries for my work. I especially love the OED or its French counterpart, the Trésor de la langue française, because their entries detail a word’s etymology and also include quotations that show its usage. Sometimes these citations stretch back over hundreds of years, and as you read through the list of fragmented phrases, you get an idea of how a particular word has changed. Meanings and pronunciations shift. Words fall out of favour or surge back into popular usage or emerge as new inventions. Sometimes, reading a dictionary entry feels a little bit like reading a story.

We invent new words every year, and some of them survive and prosper long enough to be added to dictionaries. What words might be in the dictionaries of the future? It struck me as an opportunity for science fiction. And I had read great fiction that slipped into other forms of prose — letters, diaries, newspaper articles, classified ads, headlines, blog entries, tweets — so writing the story itself as a dictionary entry sounded like an interesting challenge.

I wanted my dictionary entry to offer a glimpse of communication in the future. Many of the examples in the story echo our present fears about how technology might be affecting our social interactions. Will we stop talking face-to-face because of our smartphones? I doubt it. But now that we have so many ways to contact each other, getting together in person could take on a different significance.

As I was thinking about the effect of technology on language, I started thinking about how the Internet seems to have sped up the pace of language change, as we can track new words as they get invented, and sometimes discarded. (For example, a recent Language Log post used Twitter data to track ‘on fleek’ and ‘fleeked out’, and linguist Gretchen McCulloch discussed “vintage internet slang” at The Toast.) I wondered if there might be some future technological advance that would slow down language change. If people could communicate through thought alone, if they could share wordless feelings or images or music or half-formed ideas without having to talk at all, what would become of spoken and written language? I think they would still exist — writing has been around for five thousand years, and speech for far longer than that — but, like face-to-face conversations in the age of smartphones, they might be imbued with new and different meanings.