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 be rational and reasonable in the rest of his post. It just gets under my skin when talk show hosts make ad hominem attacks even if they are kind of kidding around. All talk show hosts are guilty of this more or less and it makes it hard for me to listen to anything else they have to say, even if I already agree with their position.

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.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance. -Wikipedia

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 other.

Similarly, other people say things like, “If you’re hungry there’s food in the fridge.” Do they mean that if I’m not hungry there is no food in the fridge? If there is food in the fridge then is this statement true: “If you are not hungry, there is food in the fridge.”

Usually when people say “if” they mean that what follows is contingent on some condition being met. For example, if you have five dollars, you can buy a hamburger.

See? It’s easy.

[Posted from Waynesboro, Georgia]

Pam McCutcheon does not mention this, but long words take up more space than short words, and that is not taken into account in the 250 words per page formula.