Words, Symbols, Icons, Pictograms
Shortlist of interesting spaces
Mondegreen
Sonorisms I
What you're trying to swim
Let the meaning choose the word
An affection for words
z-z-z
No words to describe
If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.
Good morning, Vincent
Perhaps I shall name the cat that scratches at my broken window Van Gogh.
Or Vincent.
One does not name a piece of tape, however.
There is the piece of tape, scratching at my window. There is Vincent, scratching at my window.Good morning, Vincent.
As if a word were no more than coordinates
The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google’s dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they’re all like this. They’re all a chore to read. There’s no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.
A soft and fitful luster
Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”? I can’t help but think something has been lost. “A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface” doesn’t just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, “the fitful luster,” of, for example, an eye full of tears — which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than “a wet sidewalk.”
It’s as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet’s ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.
Big things and little things
It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.
All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.
Vibrations in the air
Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.
Le ☀️ est caché par les ☁️
Reference and Is-ness
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call ‘inherent meaning’ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is ‘Is-ness’ meaning. Inherent meaning is a word’s identity, and reference merely its resumé, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. ‘Is-ness’ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing – the word – appear to be many things – its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
It flows out and fills
This deeper meaning of a word isn’t confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crew’s actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.
The demand of a new word
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand ‘felt’ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that ‘jerk’ and ‘twerp’ and ‘punk’ and ‘nitwit’ and ‘dork’ and ‘ass’ and ‘goon’ and ‘twit’ and ‘dodo’ and ‘bum’ and ‘nerd’ and ‘dunce’ and ‘turd’ and ‘boob’ and ‘chump’ and ‘bitch’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘prude’ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add ‘turkey’ and ‘squirrel’ as well?
Numeric anagrams
"Eleven plus two" is an anagram of "twelve plus one".
— Craig Sharp
/
Twelve + One = Eleven + Two
I love the beauty of this numeric/anagram equation for 13— Linda Vanderkolk
Safety cut rope axe man
In the first nuclear reactor, constructed by Enrico Fermi in 1942 under the bleachers of the University of Chicago football stadium, the control rods were held up by a manila rope. A man with an axe was told to cut the rope if the reactor got out of hand. This "safety cut rope axe man" is supposedly the origin of the term SCRAM for an emergency shutdown procedure.
He had but to speak
He had but to speak aloud the words that came into his head, and those around him would fall in line.
Fish and water
How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?
Perilous to be sure
It would not be clear where the boundary of sanctioned speech lay until an attempt had been made to cross it and that attempt had failed. Such efforts Wittgenstein regarded with benevolence. He treated them as reconnaissance expeditions, perilous to be sure, but well worth the effort expended on them.
The word invents itself
Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.
Words and Images
An Essay by René MagritteBook from the Ground: From Point to Point
A Novel by Bing Xu- z-z-z
There Is No Word
A Poem by Tony Hoaglandwhat I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all themisunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.A few things that could be poetry
An Article by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels- The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point
- Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed
- The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly
- Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context
- A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection
- An idea, if you consider it divine enough
A brief foray into vectorial semantics
An Article by James SomersOne of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”:
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
Four years of noting down my favourite words
An Article by Matt WebbI like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths.
Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain.
So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here.
Storm Doris Mimecom Cloudbleed Athleisure Cromwell H7N9 Trappist-1 ... (+448)
The primacy of interpretation over sensation
A Fragment by Mark LibermanOur memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings.
More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest.
These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.)
Derrière les fagots
A DefinitionA fagot is a bundle of branches tied with a string. They used to be kept in a corner of a barn or shed, and people used to hide things (wine, valuables, etc) behind them often for a long time, and forget about them. It is a way of saying that [a thing] is very good, but has been forgotten for a long time and recently re-discovered.
The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
An Article by Courtney HohneWhat we’ve learned from 10 years of moonshot taking about choosing your words wisely — and the many benefits of doing so:
- v0.crap
- Tiger Beetle Moments
- Killing our projects
- In the fog
- The Altimeter
- The Icebergs
- Headwinds & Tailwinds
- Chaos Pilots
- Patiently impatient, responsibly irresponsible, passionately dispassionate
Old words
A Quote by Winston ChurchillShort words are best
and the old words, when short,
are the best of all.A lightbulb is not an idea
An Article by Ralph AmmerWith conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.
When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.
Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.
And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.
The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.
Invisible Cities
An evening identical to this
He feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.
Already memories
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
Like the lines of a hand
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.
The eye does not see
The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.
In every skyscraper
In every skyscraper there is someone going mad.
An invisible landscape
Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no farther. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock’s calcareous sky.
Unpossessed places
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Dead branches
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
The gods who live beneath names
Sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
The path
From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
Falsehood
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
A model city
“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.”
“I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”
Their own absence
After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
Rearranged
Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors’ Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice’s former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants’ needs than it had been before.
In the image of their city
They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims. From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.
They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.
A city in the distance
If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes.
So that its destruction cannot begin
If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.”
An invisible thread
Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.
The inferno of the living
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.