#language

If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)

So the literal shape of “itadakimasu” is not “thank you.” It is closer to: “I humbly receive.” And the thing being received is the food. Not the labor of the cook — that has its own phrase, said afterward, to the person. “Itadakimasu,” said before, with the eyes on the plate, is addressed downward and outward, to what is about to become part of you.

“Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain beings or concepts, because to use them might mean we summon them, which we don’t want, or anger them, which we definitely don’t want, or simply make other humans mad at us, which is slightly less bad but still not ideal. The true name is powerful, and we normal humans can’t handle that power. So we avoid using the true name, but sometimes we still need to communicate with each other about those beings or concepts. That means we have to figure out a way to talk about something without using the actual word for it.

But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

The truth, however, is that consciousness is a wonder beyond its own comprehension. Perhaps the universe is nothing more than cold, calculable matter—that, as Galileo posited, “the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics.” But the laws of consciousness are written in language. Indeed, I suspect that rather than language being a development of consciousness it is a precondition of it. More specifically, I would suggest that consciousness and thought emerge from the idea of representation—that it is when we developed the idea that something can be a metaphor for, imitation of, or reference to another thing that we began to think. I would go so far as to say that, in fact, this miraculous imprecision is what thought is.

This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

Using pictures to represent words dates back to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese pictographs. But in the 1500s in France, a particular format of picture writing called the rebus was invented. A rebus is a word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words (or parts of words). The rebus became very popular in Europe and elsewhere.

Clay produced the interactive Periodic Table of Swearing for Modern Toss. It was built in our Hoxton Street studio during our summer holidays. It's constructed from over 100 buttons, CNC'ed and laser cut MDF, direct to media printing, over 100 meters of cabling, over 300 soldered joints and a whole lot of swearing!

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Republican Governors Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?

The campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills - particularly coding - in schools is gathering force.

"It turns out that the “bitter end” of a rope is the end you secure or bend to the bitts of a ship, while the other end secures the anchor. If you are hoping to anchor in very deep water, you pay out more and more line and hope that the anchor will hit the sea floor. Instead, your line runs out all the way to the bitter end, and then you are up a creek without a paddle. Thanks, W.H. Smyth, The Sailor’s Word Book, 1867."

"A hypocorism, or hypochorisma (noun): hypocoristic (adj.) (from Greek ὑποκορίζεσθαι hypokorizesthai, "to use child-talk"[1]) is a lesser form of the given name used in more intimate situations as a nickname, term of endearment, or pet name"

"Dropping the F-bomb or other expletives may not only be an expression of agony, but also a means to alleviate it"

"I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there's anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I'd be delighted to hear from you. To me, it's not English—it's a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases ("with that vote of the American people") be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons."

"Nevertheless, Palin’s verbal hodgepodge may say nothing about her qualifications for the vice presidency. Judgment and political acumen could well rest on different mental capacities than the ability to order thoughts into smooth sentences. But the inability to answer a straightforward question about economic policy without becoming tangled in words suggests either ignorance about the subject matter or a difficulty connecting between ideas. Neither explanation is reassuring. "

"Now, the word "phwoar" - meaning an "expression of enthusiastic or lubricious approval" - has gained official entry to the English language, appearing in the pages of the latest Oxford English Dictionary of Modern Slang."

"Conversation is one of the most challenging things to code in interactive fiction, and also one of the most widely discussed."

"An unlikely row has erupted in France over suggestions that the semicolon's days are numbered; worse, the growing influence of English is apparently to blame."

""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs."

""MLX" lets you type in long machine language (ML) listings with almost foolproof results."

"decafalon the grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you"

"it's the word I coined (after James Doohan, Scotty on Star Trek)! (aka "techno-babble", but I like the obscurity of "doohanian")."

"here's a quick lexicon of what computer programmers generally mean when they're talking about how hard some problem is, starting with the most extreme"

"With T9, things are now happening that are completely new to language - we are now beginning to associate some words with other words that have no logical ideological connection between them, and, one step further, we are now substituting words with

""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs."

My son just turned two, but about six months ago, I told him “Sam, go into your room and get a book and bring it out here,” and he did it, and I thought at the time, “Wow, he’s as smart as an Infocom game.”

"I hope we've learned something today."

"VERBS BAD! YOU VERB USAGE POSSESSION! OSTRACIZATION NECESSARY!"

"This list of fictional expletives contains expletives invented by writers of fictionoften science fiction or fantasyto add nuance to the fictional cultures in their work, and sometimes as a form of censorship"

"This program stems every tag in your del.icio.us collection in an effort to find duplicate concepts."

"Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an apparently insoluble difficulty."

"The erroneous or fanciful perception of a pattern or meaning in something that is actually ambiguous or random."

"The Simpsons has coined some new words, phrases, portmanteaux, and abbreviations, popularized some existing words and phrases, and also used some existing words and phrases in new ways. "

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but whose meaning is nonsensical. "

'Whenever you hear someone starting to say something that begins with "The X have no word for Y", or "The X have N different words for Y", never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's still there.'

"Our government has lied to us again, and this time it was rocket science."

"Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out - as Alexandra Aikhenvald tells us its speakers tell her."