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Meta
Category Archives: language
qualified peeve
Not a week goes by when I don’t read that some trial court has “granted qualified immunity” to some criminal with a badge. That’s inaccurate. The aggressor was granted qualified immunity by the Supreme Court when it invented that doctrine … Continue reading
Posted in language, law
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adventures in language borrowing
In this episode of College Roomies from Hell!, there appears in otherwise Spanish dialogue (the author is Mexican, I believe) the word Sepa, which would be pronounced like French sais pas (“dunno”), which fits the context.
Posted in language
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concepts that are not quite writing
I was thinking about the notion of a brain interface that delivers text to a layer after vision: the user “sees” the letters at their most abstract, but not their graphic details. What would that experience be like? Could it … Continue reading
Posted in language, technology
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polyglot priority
A genie offers to make you fluent in twenty or a hundred languages, living or dead. How do you choose? The greedy algorithm: add whatever language most increases the number of people, living or dead, with whom you could have … Continue reading
Posted in language
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graceless prose
. . . a Kennewick Washington based [organization] based in Southeastern Washington. Not only did someone write that, an accountant and a lawyer probably looked it over before it went public, and no one thought to rephrase it . . . an [organization] based … Continue reading
Posted in language
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shibboleths?
In The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, there are two yes-men: Tony, who likes to say “Great!”, and David, who likes to say “Super!”. If I were writing it, their distinctive tics would instead be “in terms of ——” … Continue reading
less than fifty years later
I’ve read Heinlein’s Red Planet three times, starting at age seven or eight, and each time I soon forgot most of the plot. One thing that stuck with me was that the school’s new head signaled his evil by ordering … Continue reading
Posted in heraldry, language, prose
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