Category Archives: language

Informal fallacies are ones that do not depend on the argument’s specific form. They are as wrong in modus tollens as they are in modus ponens, or any other valid deductive form. For a long time I’ve been promoting the … Continue reading →

Art is an act of communication between two human beings that involves intentionality on the part of the creator and inference of that intentionality on the part of at least one impersonal experiencer. By “impersonal experiencer” I mean one who … Continue reading →

“The Mythical Man Month” was published in the mid-70’s and most of it still rings true today: adding people to a late project makes it later, and there is no silver bullet. It probably says something about software developers that … Continue reading →

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes is an absolutely fascinating, compelling, humane and curious book. It is a mix of personal memoir and linguistic field study and theory by Dan Everett, who spent a good chunk of the past thirty years … Continue reading →

Pentameter (non-standard): This formulaic stanza has some power despite its tendency to come and go, yielding up a soft and scented flower with sufficient patience: watch it grow into a bloom of rich diversity without engaging in perversity. It varies … Continue reading →

People change. Not everyone, and not all the time, but most people over the course of their lives change. Being the centre of their own world, mind, they don’t often notice their own changes, attributing it all instead to the … Continue reading →

Fox News, for “Japan’s Nuclear Rescuers: ‘Inevitable Some of Them May Die Within Weeks’” In other news, it is inevitable that every person reading this may get hit by a bus on the way home today, it is inevitable that … Continue reading →

Just as a warning to the easily nauseated, I’m going to wind up talking about DSSSL before I get to the end of this post. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with PHP and CSS while working up … Continue reading →

don’t bother to read just make up all the meanings you want this to have This apparently is what all utterances mean: whatever the listener wants them too, based on anything except asking the utterer, “What did you mean by … Continue reading →

Pieces of my mind go drifting down this stream of cluttered consciousness today: swirling in the sluggish current, drowned by flotsam-jetsam floating by the way. Washer-women rinse their tattered linen, children’s feet go splashing through the mud, tree-trunks pull at … Continue reading →