Dedwarmo

Silence

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) [...]

Marvin Minsky has written an article he calls, “Communicating with Alien Intelligence.” He does not address the problem of how to differentiate between random gibberish and a message from an alien intelligence. He skips ahead to a hypothetical meeting of humans and aliens and asks whether or not they would be able to [...]

Why do people say, “going forward,” as in, “We will do things differently going foward”? They can’t go back and change the past, so of course they are speaking of the future. The phrase “from now on” is equally useless. I think maybe people pad their language with extra words to emphasize that they [...]

I’m still learning 3-letter words. I promise that until 2008 I had never heard the word vet used as a verb, as in, “They failed to vet the candidate before nomination.” Am I crazy or did this usage begin very recently?

Joseph Asbell was my roommate back before the turn of the century. We parted ways when he went off to be an LDS missionary. Now he is working for a non-profit in California and puts his LDS Libertarian views on his blog ldslibertarian.blogspot.com.

Terry Gross, on her program, Fresh Air, routinely says, “If you’re just joining us, my guest is so an so. . .” But whether I’m just joining her or not has no bearing on who her guest is. What she means is: “My guest is so and so and I’m saying that for the benefit [...]

According to Pam McCutcheon, when you are discussing your manuscript with your publisher your word count should be based on 250 words a page (1 inch margins, 25 lines per page, 12 point non-proportional font) and not the actual word count. This is because some parts of your manuscript may have fewer words per [...]

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