I’m curious where you learned about the word svaha and this definition. I ask because I’ve been trying to find a citable source for that very same definition of the word ever since I learned of it at Antioch College in the late 80′s. I run a web hosting business Svaha LLC (http://svaha.com/) and at the beginning I too thought it was a swahili word. However a few years later I met someone who spoke swahili and he said that it was not actually a swahili word.

I’ll spare the details but I’ve been searching for where this word came from for many years now and I’ve detailed highlights of this search on our website at http://www.svaha.com/about/why/

So I’d love to know where you learned of this word, I figure eventually someone might be able to lead to me a definitive source.
Thanks

-Matt
Manager of Svaha.Com

As to your original question about teaching cultural literacy/creativity, I believe the answer to be “yes.” Will everyone who studies creativity become a South Park originator? Of course not. But, not every piano student becomes Mozart, either; most just learn to play OK piano. OK piano’s a lot better than no piano, for my money.

But I wonder if your slip was not revealing of something deeper here: the idea you’re presenting is that we know that we know something, but we don’t yet know what it is we know, as Secretary Rumsfeld might say. We realise or intuit the presence of some phenomenon before we know what the phenomenon is. Thunder is an effect of lightning, so perhaps it is natural that we’d imagine that we would perceive the thunder first. But in fact we perceive the actual phemonenon of lightning first (unless we happen not to be looking in its direction).

So, you may have been unconsciously thinking about this in time-reverse mode, as if we usually perceived the thunder first, and only then the lightning, ie, as if an effect could preceed a cause.

But such a time-reversed view is in keeping with, for example, millenarian ideas, religious ideas that we are at the end-times. The various omens used to predict (eg) the Second Coming (of Jesus of Nazarath) are often considered by believers as effects, rather than causes, since the Second Coming itself is the cause. Although it may seem strange for me to say this in the same breath, scenario forecasters adopt a similar perspective in identifying omens and signs: a trend is identified by effects (small omens, signs) that have a deeper underlying cause (the trend), but these effects are usually perceived much earlier than is their true cause. We hear the thunder before we see the lightning, in other words.

Much to think about here. Thanks.

Peter, yes, there is that sweet spot between too much in common and too little. But that in between point can be astonishingly productive. That’s interesting, really lone gestation periods. Now Svaha fails us as a metaphor and even “gestation” is too little. Thanks, Grant

JohnO, yes, speed of capture is a problem, I want a blackboard but I never seem to have one near by, so it’s pen and paper. But it is as if the idea is dropping by or passing through and we either record it or lose it. Thanks, Grant
p.s., somewhere on TV recently I saw black board done in glass that looked pretty splendid.

However, for me, personally, this transition can take a very long time. Last weekend, I just put flesh in a conference paper to an idea that has been in this svaha phase for almost 2 years. It was only this weekend, when I sat down to write the idea for perhaps the 5th time, that I finally was able to articulate it. But I recall exactly the moment when I knew the idea was there, 2 years ago, which was while reading a book on a totally unrelated topic, and which I suddenly realized was relevant to my problem (the problem was in computer science, the book on the anthropology of art).

In another case, I wrote a paper in 2001 which articulated an idea that I’d had vaguely in 1979, and which I’d looked at on and off in the interim. But in that case I wasn’t engaged full-time in the area, so perhaps the idea would have been born sooner if I’d focused more attention on it.

Regarding ideas with others: I’ve worked with about 3 people in my life with whom I have sufficient sympathy and sufficient distance that we spark great ideas in conversation together. Too much sympathy means you’ll just agree with each other, like talking to yourself, sparking no new ideas at all. Too much distance means you’ll talk past each other, or worse, spark disagreement rather than ideas. There has to be a subtle blend of both sympathy and distance. It is very rare, IME, to find such people. Finding them and working with them in brainstorm sessions is pure bliss.

BTW, I am really intrigued by the existence of the word “svaha”, it makes me wonder: how many other languages have a word for this phenomenon?