language
Spike and spon
The pernicious issue with pangrams
The language itself has been weaponized
It’s quite difficult, to fight back against the seeming wisdom of axiomatic “truths,” when the language itself has been weaponized through the power of pattern. Through rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and consonance.
The last time I was in England was at the invitation of Nomensa, to give a talk at a conference wherein I encouraged the audience to discard an axiom that I feel has done users of the English language more harm than good through endless and glib repetitions.
Like “Curiosity Killed The Cat,” “You Are Not Your User” sounds so good that we keep on saying it, without appreciating what we’re reifying through repetition. The pleasure of repetition, the pleasure of pattern matching, the pleasingness of Kuh Kuh Kuh consonants on the one hand, and of the round vowelly Yuh Yuh Yuh on the other make these things we say seem true because they sound and feel so good to say.
The fire of oak logs
The fire of oak logs which burned day and night for six months became the focal point of our family life.
...It is inevitable that the English word "home" cannot be translated directly into French. The nearest equivalent in French is the word foyer, the hearth.
Nominalization
The English language provides bad writers with a dangerous weapon called nominalization: making something into a noun.
Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement.
"Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria” would be better said as “we excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.”
“There is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation” would be better as “I don’t anticipate that I will have to cancel.”
Zombie sounds, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That is what they have in common with the passive constructions that also bog down these examples.
The arbitrariness of the sign
A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs.
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?
Scooting over
There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word ‘scoot over’ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different.
We must go with them
"You cannot make what you want to make, but what the material permits you to make. You cannot make out of marble what you would make out of wood, or out of wood what you would make out of stone. Each material has its own life, and one cannot without punishment destroy a living material to make a dumb senseless thing. That is, we must not try to make our materials speak our language, we must go with them to the point where others will understand their language."
— Constantin Brancusi
The receiving end
At times it helps to rephrase an observation in line with a perspective from the receiving end of technology. When my colleagues in the field of cold-water engineering speak of "ice-infested waters", I am tempted to think of "rig-infested oceans". Language is a fine barometer of values and priorities. As such it deserves careful attention.
The language of art
Everything points to the conclusion that the phrase 'the language of art' is more than a loose metaphor, that even to describe the visible world in images we need a developed system of schemata.
You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary
An Essay by James SomersBook from the Ground: From Point to Point
A Novel by Bing Xu- z-z-z
In Defense of Browsing
An Essay by Leanne ShaptonThe feeling of fortuitous gratitude at coming across unexpected information is something most of us who’ve done any research, have experienced — that kismet of finding the perfect book, one spine away from the one that was sought. In the field of art and image research, this sparking of transmission, of sequence and connection, happens on a subconscious level.
…Why is the vernacular image still being dismissed as ephemera? Why is its study not being prioritized? All languages are alive, but visual language is galactic. Keywords are not eyeballs, and creating rutted pathways to follow is the antithesis of study. A century of visual language, knowledge, and connectivity is marching toward a narrow, parsimonious basement of nomenclature. The NYPL takes a step backward if it models its shelves and research on a search engine. Spontaneity is learning. Browsing is research.
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.Idiolect
A DefinitionIdiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people.
Tortured phrases
An Article by Holly ElseIn April 2021, a series of strange phrases in journal articles piqued the interest of a group of computer scientists. The researchers could not understand why researchers would use the terms ‘counterfeit consciousness’, ‘profound neural organization’ and ‘colossal information’ in place of the more widely recognized terms ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘deep neural network’ and ‘big data’.
Further investigation revealed that these strange terms — which they dub “tortured phrases” — are probably the result of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism. And they seem to be rife in computer-science papers.
Poison sniffers
An Article by Austin KleonChristopher Johnson says “prescriptivists” or “Cute Curmudgeons” — people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules — are “linguistic poison sniffers.” They turn language into “a source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.”
Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to “what makes language delicious.”
This reminded of Olivia Laing’s distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.
Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious meal…
What happened when I stopped using Emojis
An Article by Clo S.In March 2021, I went through a fun self-imposed experiment: no emoji for 2 weeks. Not on social media, not in private messages, not even as Slack or Discord reactions. No emoticon either: the goal was to communicate without illustrations, only with words. I did a semi-rigorous (a.k.a. half-assed) diary study, taking notes on my feelings and behaviour.
What 80% Comprehension Feels Like
An ArticleOne of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension?
The Poetics of Space
Poetic drugs
In the final chapters Bachelard lets slip (a confession really) how if he "were a psychiatrist," he would recommend a poem by Baudelaire to treat "anguish." His squabble then is not with the purpose but rather the approach of a still-young profession. And of course, why not treat the power of great poems as something akin to "virtual 'drugs'"?
The world itself dreams
For Plato and many medieval philosophers, imagination was construed primarily as a mimetic act of mirroring, representing, copying. This approach was often associated with deceit and illusion, with confounding original realities with secondary substitutes. By contrast, for Kant and the romantics—including German idealists and existentialists like Sartre—imagination was hailed as a productive force in its own right, the source of all true meaning and value.
Bachelard resisted both extremes. For him, imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable. The world itself dreams, he said, and we help give it voice.
The past of his image upon me
The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me. The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance.
In the world of sunlight
And here we come back to that forgotten, outcast word, the soul.
Indeed, the soul possesses an inner light, the light that an inner vision knows and expresses in the world of brilliant colors, in the world of sunlight.
Refuges
Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.
Deprived of all thickness
Here space is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory. Memory—what a strange thing it is!—does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness. The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space.
Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.
The odor of raisins
What would be the use, for instance, in giving the plan of the room that was really my room, in describing the little room at the end of the garret, in saying that from the window, across the indentations of the roofs, one could see the hill. I alone, in my memories of another century, can open the deep cupboard that still retains for me alone that unique odor, the odor of raisins drying on a wicker tray. The odor of raisins! It is an odor that is beyond description, one that it takes a lot of imagination to smell. But I've already said too much. If I said more, the reader, back in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe, with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy.
Oneiric topography
If I were the architect of an oneiric house, I should hesitate between a three-story house and one with four. A three-story house, which is the simplest as regards essential height, has a cellar, a ground floor, and an attic; while a four-story house puts a floor between the ground floor and the attic. One floor more, and our dreams become blurred. In the oneiric house, topoanalysis only knows how to count to three or four.
Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons
...and we feel warm because it is cold out-of-doors.
I am the space where I am
Je suis l'espace où je suis.
This is a great line. But nowhere can it be better appreciated than in a corner.
My house is diaphanous
My house is diaphanous, but it is not made of glass. It is more of the nature of vapor. Its walls contract and expand as I desire.