The Concept Card

One idea of the language in card form — its name, its one-line sense, its neighbours, and where it is discussed — so a concept can be dealt and sorted beside the work that uses it.

A page explains. A card is held. The Concept Card is the card face of a page: the smallest thing you can put in someone's hand that still carries a whole idea, pointing back at the page where the idea is actually written. The page is the source; the card never becomes a second, drifting copy of it.

It is load-bearing because ideas and work are usually kept in separate places, and the separation is expensive. A library of concepts that nobody consults while working is an ornament; work that proceeds without the language it was designed in reinvents things badly. Putting a concept in the same shape as a piece of work means it can sit on the same table, be picked up in the middle of a decision, be sorted next to the Quest that needs it, and be handed to a newcomer who has three minutes (Card Types, Work Deck).

It also changes how a language is taught. Fifty cards can be spread on a table, grouped by hand, argued over, and rearranged by people who would never read fifty pages — and the rearranging is itself a way of finding out what a body actually understands (Pattern Card, The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, Curation).

The card's discipline is its brevity and its honesty about being partial. One line of sense is not the concept; it is the handle. A reader who wants the thing follows the link, and a card that begins to grow paragraphs has stopped being a card and should go back to being a page (Limit Statement, Essences, Renderings, And Ineffable Referents).

Also called: concept card Stands on: Card Types · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon · The Core Concepts Opens onto: Pattern Card · Word Tools · The Field · Curation · Link concepts, not coordinates · One canonical home per concept In play: the table — dealt beside the work that needs the idea Sources: Card Types.md (wiki root; a proposal, unreviewed — the page states this type is named there for the first time) · Pattern Card (canon; the nearest existing kin) · lionsberg.wiki: Card Types Open: Named once and never built; nothing exists that generates a concept card from a page, and nothing says what happens to a card when its page is renamed or merged. · Its relation to the Pattern Card, which already holds a very similar shape, is unstated.