Are you a philosophical whore-angel?

By Eveline van Zeeland

In a weekly column, alternately written by Eveline van Zeeland, Eugène Franken, PG Kroeger, Katleen Gabriels, Carina Weijma, Bernd Maier-Leppla, Willemijn Brouwer and Colinda de Beer, Innovation Origins tries to figure out what the future will look like. These columnists, sometimes joined by guest bloggers, are all working in their own way to find solutions to the problems of our time. So tomorrow will be good. Here are all the previous articles.

Language belongs to all of us. We are all entitled to use it and also to design it. Particularly the latter is special for a collective cultural resource. Most collective resources (such as legislation or art) concern us or we may use them, but we are not allowed to (re)design them. However, this does apply to language. We all get to engage with language as designers.

We may redesign language by either bastardizing it into dialect or contorting it into slang. But we are also allowed to design new word combinations or even invent totally new words or phrases. Some of these (re)designs become adopted by others. For example, we all know terms such as the ‘one-and-a-half-meter-society’ (‘anderhalvemetersamenleving’ – which was named the word of the year in the Netherlands in 2020) or the expression ‘Me too‘. There was one person somewhere in the world who designed each of these new words, and as a result of rapid adoption by others, a diffusion process took place and the word swept through all of society.

The language designer

Sadly, that diffusion process does not happen with every word or phrase. There are gems of language design that nonetheless fail to reach the wider public. One of those gems, in my opinion, is ‘philosophical whore-angel‘. The ‘philosophical whore-angel’ was created by Connie Palmen in her book The Laws (1991).

In The Laws, one of the seven male characters in the book, the astrologer, typecasts the female protagonist as follows (p. 18): “Your pleasure is anchored in your wee head, in learning. Passion for you is passion of the mind. That makes you a philosophical whore-angel. You wrangle with the most precious thing about yourself: you sell your soul for a modicum of knowledge. The more you get the chance to let your brain run rampant, the more gratified and happy you are. Thinking relaxes you.”

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Learning foreign languages can affect the processing of music in the brain – Innovation Origins

Het leren van vreemde talen kan de verwerking van muziek in de hersenen beïnvloeden.

Hit the spot

I have rarely seen a more apt design than the term ‘philosophical whore-angel’. The characterization of the type of person is spot on. After all, you can easily picture this type of person standing in front of you. There is probably someone around you who bears a strong resemblance to Connie Palmen’s philosophical whore-angel. How different is that with characterizations of people in colors, as you see more and more often in management land nowadays?

The accurate description of a philosophical whore-angel helps you to relate to the design the term. You ask yourself to what extent you are a philosophical whore-angel yourself. Or you try to analyze what kind of person is most compatible with a philosophical whore-angel. This language design makes you think and at the same time it puts a smile on your face because of the fascinating wordplay. After all, who would ever put the words ‘philosophy‘, ‘whore‘ and ‘angel‘ together? And just how wondrous is the result of this combination of words?

Maya

When it comes to innovating and designing, most people are intent on doing something completely different – to be groundbreaking by doing things no one else had ever known about or thought up before. However, the finest innovations and designs are often far more straightforward and simply do something groundbreaking with what has already been around for a long time. We are so heavily focused on reinventing the wheel, that we sometimes forget what a great car we can build on the wheels that we already have.

Philosophical whore-angel is a new design that is based entirely on three existing words. As a result, it easily ties in with what you already are familiar with, yet still conveys something utterly new. That playing with the familiar versus the new is known as the MAYA principle: More Advanced Yet Acceptable.

Familiar and yet innovative

The MAYA principle was advanced by Raymond Loewy, the ‘Godfather’ of Industrial Design, and has been several times in research: good design plays with what is already trusted and familiar, but in its own way, also brings in something innovative.

The MAYA principle in itself is not a key to success, otherwise we would all be referring to the philosophical whore-angel every day. However, it is a prerequisite for adoption by the general public. Without a trusted and familiar element in a new design, it tends to be difficult to market that design in an effective way. So, if you want new ideas or concepts to spread to the wider public, wrap them in a cloak of familiarity. Start playing with the ingredients that are already in front of you and turn them into a new cocktail. Mixing existing ingredients in different ways can already produce fantastic results; you just need to want to see that.