If you don’t remember George Carlin’s speech that contains the phrase “six sins for one feel”, go ahead and look it up.

When I first heard it, the phrase “feel her up” was new to me, but its meaning was obvious. Thirty-some years later, I reckon I must have known some synonymous expression, but cannot recall what it was!

Backtracking a search that led to my runes, I found this page that seems to claim that the futhark descended from a Russian system based on segments selected from the wheel graph W₆. One needn’t accept the claim to find the system at least a little bit interesting.

Got an idea for a transhuman story element.

Assume that the technology exists to let you acquire fluency in a language of your choice as easily as you install a font on your computer. (Such technology figures in When Gravity Fails and probably bunches of other fiction.)

My idea is a Private Language Generator, which uses some source of true random noise to generate a language — syntax, phonology, morphology, lexicon — from the ground up, and install it using the interface assumed above. When two or more people use the device together, they acquire the ability to communicate ‘naturally’ in a language that no eavesdropper can interpret.

This leads to a new kind of traffic analysis. Any two people who Tweet in the same unknown language thereby expose their association. So maybe the PLG is not all that useful for secrecy. But lovers, for example, might use it for fun. (See also The Languages of Pao.)

I’ve been getting Russian spams in which some of the Cyrillic letters “Аа В Ее К М Н Оо Рр Сс Т у Хх” are replaced by the similar Latin letters “Aa B Ee K M H Oo Pp Cc T y Xx”, defeating Google Translate.

Whenever I watch a recent French movie, I miss just enough wordplay to wish it had French subtitles.

My newest incoming link is from Wendy Krieger, whose site you should definitely see if you’re interested in polytopes, duodecimalism or the letter Þ.

When (American) TV actors utter the phrase “What are you doing here?”, as I must have heard dozens of times lately, they nearly always emphasize doing — and I nearly always think it would make more sense to emphasize either here or you; if the question were provoked by your doing rather than your presence, the asker would omit here.

Am I taking the phrase too literally? How do you say it?