Following on from the biface, which we passed forward for 1.7 million years without writing it down, an experiment.
The exceptional Abi Awomosu has built a tool that examines any piece of writing for traces of inheritance. It reads what you've written and shows you where your language comes from. Which idioms are borrowed. Which cadences you learned from someone else. Which framings you've absorbed so completely that they no longer feel borrowed at all.
Paste in something you're proud of. Not something you dashed off. Something you laboured over. A pitch. A speech. A blog post you've been sitting on. Anything you'd call distinctively yours.
Take a spin through the results.
My guess is that you'll see old friends and long internalised memories all through your writing. The teacher who first made you love a particular sentence rhythm. The book you read three times in a year at seventeen. The colleague whose emails you unconsciously started to mimic. The city you grew up in. The country you visited that changed the way you thought about work. All of it distilled into the sentences you now think of as yours.
We are each our own uniquely configured context. But we share a lot with the people we learned with, the place we grew up in, and the places we've travelled. Some of that is choice. Much of it is accident of birth.
The thing that makes us human is as much carrying stories as it is creating them.
If everything you produce carries traces of everyone who taught you, then the people who taught you are still in the world. Their sentences show up in your writing. Their patterns still run through you. The community you learned inside is still talking through you.
Ethnogenesis is real. Voices really do get born. But mostly, voices get carried.
Part two of a short series on inherited ideas. Piece one on the biface here. Piece three, on what the curator does when everyone else is retrieving, is out in a few days. Plan B builds brands that survive being carried. Get in touch.
