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Meta
Category Archives: humanities
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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questions of emphasis
In Sherlock episode “The Lying Detective”, the phrase serial killer is uttered many times, always stressing the first word – as if the second were a given, even when (for the speakers) any killings are hypothetical. That impaired my enjoyment of … Continue reading
Posted in cinema, language
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a sort of conlang
I’m re-reading Strugatsky’s Hard to Be a God. (I read it thirty-odd years ago and forgot nearly everything.) This is a newer translation, by Olena Bormashenko. At one point the protagonist eavesdrops on conspirators, who say: “The chonted will shlake, … Continue reading
Posted in language, prose
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the death of English, part MMXVII
Here: Like much of the news that ekes its way out of the totalitarian state, the murder is equal parts scary, sad, and vaguely comical. I don’t think I had seen this extension of eke before. Once upon a time, … Continue reading
Posted in language
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