Another thing I wouldn’t mind hearing less of: the word infamous used as an emphatic synonym for famous.

When symbol-space is arbitrary, whimsy sometimes happens.

In the chaos that is my mind at this hour —

Brain damage such as stroke can take away the symbolic processing ability known as language. I wonder: does the most obvious kind of sign-language, pointing and miming, go with it? And do Deaf signers so afflicted lose more or less of the naïve sign-language than the hearing do? In one sense these questions have no meaningful answer, because every stroke is different; but there must be interesting correlations.

Does stroke ever take away the ability to process conditional or relative clauses?

I see that in Yahoo’s Chinese translation my name is “安東 Sherwood”, i.e. Anton becomes ‘peace+east’ (which in Japanese is pronounced antō, unfortunately).

Thirty-odd years ago I read Alvin’s Secret Code by Clifford B. Hicks (1963), which begins when a puzzling telegram falls into the hands of two boys. The only sentence in it that makes any kind of sense to them is “Ivan hiding message oak,” so they look in a hollow oak tree but find nothing. They take the telegram to a retired spy, who explains that it is in a commercial code which, as luck would have it, he devised; “Ivan hiding message oak” means “Jones arriving Blanksville Wednesday.”

Now I learn from Kahn’s The Code-Breakers that, in the jargon of the Russian Communist underground, dubok ‘little oak’ meant a hiding-place for messages. Hmmm.

You don’t need me to tell you that the case of Maher Arar (cited by Charlie Stross) has gloomy implications. So instead I’ll remark that I’m pleased to see in the article the phrase “a Qaeda member.” If any American paper were so pedantic as to agree with me that the definite article in Al Qaeda ought to be dropped in such phrases just because we’d do so with an English phrase like The Brotherhood, I guess the New York Times would be it.

I’ve also coined the mongrel noun Qaedista but never had occasion to use it.

A set comprises its members; a set consists of its members; a set is composed of its members — but a set is not comprised of anything.

“Thank you for observing all safety precautions.”