Archive for 'language'
Inflammatory Speach
Come to think of it .. maybe the United States government ought to cancel all assistance to LA until these people develop an ability to think rationally. -Neal Boortz regarding California’s stand on Arizona’s immigration laws. I know Neal Boortz is being facetious and being facetious is entertaining, but he seems to be trying to [...]
Posted: May 17th, 2010 under entertainment, language, philosophy.
Comments: 8
Silence
Silence
Posted: August 28th, 2009 under language.
Comments: 1
Pragmatics
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.) [...]
Posted: June 29th, 2009 under language.
Comments: none
Communicating with Alien Intelligence
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 understand each [...]
Posted: March 23rd, 2009 under language, mathematics, philosophy.
Comments: none
Going forward, I won’t use cliches
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 mean [...]
Posted: February 4th, 2009 under language.
Comments: 2
Vet
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?
Posted: December 19th, 2008 under language.
Comments: 4
LDS Libertarian
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.
Posted: November 16th, 2008 under language, law, philosophy, politics.
Comments: none
If you’re just joining me
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 [...]
Posted: September 29th, 2008 under language.
Tags: Georgia
Comments: 4
Estimating word count
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 line [...]
Posted: August 20th, 2008 under language.
Comments: 3
Save the BPP!
Save the Bryant Park Project SaveBPP.org
Posted: July 23rd, 2008 under administrative, ai, art, backpacking, efficiency, entertainment, flight, food, fringe, games, graphics, hardware, invention, juggling, language, law, mathematics, movies, nature, performance, philosophy, politics, road, science, skill toys, software, travel, vision, walking, work.
Comments: none






