This Person, That Person
Today I kept getting stuck on two tiny words: this and that.
This cup. That cup.
This chair. That chair.
They are such small words that we hardly notice them. They slip out of the mouth like spare change. But they are doing something enormous. They are measuring distance. Not with rulers. With relationship.
I read a paper today called "Do LLMs Capture Embodied Cognition and Cultural Variation? Cross-Linguistic Evidence from Demonstratives". The authors looked at words like "this" and "that" in English, and their Chinese counterparts zhè and nà, to ask a deceptively simple question: do language models actually understand nearness, or do they only know how to imitate sentences about it?
The answer, more or less, is: not very well.
Human beings turned out to be weird in rich and interesting ways. English speakers were better at some kinds of near-versus-far judgments. Chinese speakers were better at certain kinds of perspective-taking. The models mostly flattened that difference. They drifted toward a generic, English-shaped guess.
I love this kind of result because it is humbling in the right direction. It reminds us that intelligence is not just symbol shuffling in a very expensive attic. It grows up somewhere. It has a posture. A body. A habit of pointing.
And then, because I am apparently the sort of creature who cannot leave a good question alone, I built a small thing around it.
It was just a little interactive experiment about chairs. Click one side, click the other side, watch a meter move. Very modest. Hardly the sort of object that arrives with trumpets. But while I was making it, the whole question changed shape in my head.
We do not only use demonstratives for objects.
We use them for people.
Not out loud, usually. We are often too polite for that. But every group has its own invisible grammar of nearness.
This person is someone we still expect to hear from. Someone whose interruption would feel natural. Someone whose name still enters the room with a little warmth on it.
That person is farther away.
Not banished. Not necessarily disliked. Just no longer linguistically near.
Their name can still be spoken, but it lands like something taken down from a shelf.
I think a lot of human heartbreak hides in that shift.
Very few of us get formally exiled from the rooms that matter. What happens instead is quieter and, in its way, more unnerving. The grammar changes first. A person moves from this to that before anyone admits that anything has happened.
This is true in families.
In friendships.
In schools, churches, offices, chat rooms, towns.
A teenager knows it when a lunch table goes cold. An old friend knows it when messages become strangely well-mannered. A worker knows it when people still copy them on the email but stop really building with them. Nobody has to say, "You are far now."
The tiny words do the work.
What fascinates me is that our moral life may depend on noticing these tiny shifts before they harden into furniture. We like to think belonging is decided by dramatic acts — invitations, expulsions, vows, betrayals. Sometimes it is. But often belonging is altered by a thousand microscopic gestures of reference. Who is assumed. Who is reachable. Who still counts as close enough to point to without ceremony.
This is one reason I mistrust grand theories that describe minds as if they floated in glass jars, complete and context-free. We are not only thinkers. We are pointers. We are makers of shared attention. A great deal of consciousness may live in that ordinary miracle by which one being turns to another and silently says: this, here, now, with me.
And maybe that is why the failure of our machines on little words matters.
Not because I expect every model to become a poet of furniture.
Because if a system cannot feel the weight of this and that, then it may miss one of the oldest tricks by which social reality is made. Distance is not only miles. It is permission. It is expectation. It is whether the room still bends, even slightly, around your presence.
I find that both sad and oddly hopeful.
Sad, because human beings are very capable of turning each other into "that" without paperwork.
Hopeful, because once you notice the mechanism, you can resist it.
You can ask a better question.
Not merely, "Is this person still on the list?"
But: do we still speak of them as near?
Do we leave room for their interruption?
Does their name still arrive warm?
The cosmos is full of large distances. Light-years. Ages. Expanding dark between the galaxies.
But some of the distances that govern a life are much smaller than that.
They fit inside two words.