Tress of the Emerald Sea

by Brandon Sanderson

It might seem that the person who can feel for others is doomed in life. Isn’t one person’s pain enough? Why must a person like Tress feel for two, or more? Yet I’ve found that the people who are the happiest are the ones who learn best how to feel. It takes practice, you know. Effort. And those who (late in life) have been feeling for two, three, or a thousand different people…well, turns out they’ve had a leg up on everyone else all along. Empathy is an emotional loss leader. It pays for itself eventually.

Irony is a curious concept. Specifically, I mean the classical definition: that of a choice leading to an opposite outcome from what is intended. Many grammarians bemoan the word’s near-constant misuse—second only in dictional assassination to the way some people use the word “literally.” (Their use of which is ironic.) I’m not one of those people who care if you use words wrong. I prefer it when words change meaning. The imprecision of our language is a feature; it best represents the superlative fact of human existence: that our own emotions—even our souls—are themselves imprecise. Our words, like our hearts, are weapons still hot from the forging, beating themselves into new shapes each time we swing them. Yet irony is an intriguing concept. It exists only where we want to find it, because for true irony, expectation is key. Irony must be noticed to exist. We create it from nothing when

Precision of Language hot take