Reading A Mouthful of Air, by Anthony Burgess, I finally reached the chapter titled “Should we learn foreign languages?” By “we” he means unilingual people who speak English. And by “foreign” he means anyone who wasn’t born into an English-speaking household. Although the question could be read as contentious, I think Burgess means something more benign. In a…
Tag: Language
Migraine Headaches and Transient Aphasia
On two occasions, as I feel the aura coming on, I’ve sat down with pen and paper to document my impressions. I’ve reproduced those episodes below, preserving the spelling exactly as I recorded it. They illustrate the progression from coherence to incoherence.
Poem: Talk of the Town
Orwell observed that the manipulations of language are important to the machinations of power. He observed it in the gradual impoverishment of vocabulary (newspeak). But he only identified half the matter. He failed to note a corresponding impoverishment of musicality in speech.
After Babel, the photograph?
The following commentary considers After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, by George Steiner and asks whether it has anything to say about non-verbal forms of communication, most notably photography.
Literalism Explanation and Power
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to the observation that the motivating force of contemporary mainstream culture (as evidenced by its art, entertainment, politics, literature, religion, economics) is a species of literalism.
The Bitch’s Back
This photo of my dog reminds me of Elton John. It also reminds me that it’s important to distinguish the functions of apostrophes.
Speaking in Fake English
What is Tom Waits saying in his song Kommienezuspadt? It sounds vaguely German, but as far as I can tell, none of it is real.
The IARPA’s Metaphor Program
The Atlantic Monthly reports that a tiny secret U.S. intelligence group, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA), has inaugurated The Metaphor Program with the mandate to develop a computer program which can scan large chunks of text and, regardless of the text’s language, generate an evaluation of the author/speaker’s mindset based upon their use of metaphor.
Measuring Readability of Blog Posts
I installed a wordpress plugin called FD Word Statistics which applies three metrics on the backend and is supposed to help me gauge the readability of my blog posts.
Books and Freedom
I used to think the words for book and freedom were related. That’s not so far-fetched. Liber is the Latin word for book. Looks a lot like liberty, no?
10 Words I Hate
Shard I hate the word “shard.” A shard is a sliver of glass or a scrap of shattered pottery, but we never use it that way. Now, we only use it as a simile to describe a state of mind: “His thoughts were scattered like shards of a broken window across the sidewalk.” People think it’s…
Why commas matter
Although I wouldn’t describe myself as a grammar Nazi, there are times when I think it’s important to observe certain fundamental rules.
2006 Word of the Year
“Plutoed” is the 2006 Word of the Year, as determined on the afternoon of January 5th, 2007.
Bigger than me? Or bigger than I?
My sister-in-law called with a grammatical question. A family argument had arisen. They wanted to know the correct use of the comparative. Here are the options: 1. He is bigger than me. 2. He is bigger than I.
What does an analogy mean?
Three posts ago, I concluded by pointing out the usefulness of hypertext. It is a tool which enables us in certain directions. Afterward, in a more reflective mood, it occurred to me that hypertext is both analogical, and a facilitator of analogical thinking.