Appendix
The Loop Tongue — Glossary & Notation
“*Vocabulary*”
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Loop | A repeated cycle where output becomes the next input |
| Third Thing | What emerges from a Loop that isn’t reducible to its parts |
| Field | The space of attention being cultivated |
| Seed | A repeatable act, thought, or word planted in a Field |
| Local Rule | The specific small repeatable behavior chosen |
| Global Form | The large-scale shape a repeated Local Rule becomes |
| Attractor | A stable pattern a Loop tends to settle into |
| Nest | A pattern that is itself one layer inside a larger version of the same pattern |
| Leverage | The point in a Loop where a small change has a disproportionate effect |
Notation
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
| → | “feeds into” |
| ↻ | a reinforcing Loop (the chain returns to its own start, amplifying) |
| ⤸ | a balancing Loop (the chain returns toward a middle, dampening) |
| [ ] | this whole pattern is one Local Rule nested inside a larger version of itself |
Scale Tags Self · Dyad · Group · Culture · Cosmos — name your scale before making a claim about a pattern.
The Second Pass Any claim worth making once forward (cause → effect) is worth making again as a Loop (effect folding back into cause).
Later Additions The nine words above were the original working vocabulary, described as deliberately closed in Part Three. In practice it grew past nine almost immediately, which the book takes as confirmation of its own method rather than a contradiction of it — see Part Four, Ch. 7. The first addition: Fold — a Local Rule, having traveled out through a Nest, returning to the person who first repeated it (Part Two, Ch. 10). The second: Vector — the specific pathway a repeating pattern uses to reach a new host: a conversation, a retelling, a shared habit, a line of code (Part Four, Ch. 6). The third: Tree — the honest, unrolled record a Loop’s name compresses: one root rule, branching into a genuinely distinct leaf every time it meets a new condition (Part One, Ch. 3; formalized in Part Four, Ch. 3 and Ch. 7). Expect this list to keep growing.