Chance truth in mistranslation
“Wash your hands before abandoning this place”
Category: language
metaphors we use that belie any mind/body split
when you want to say something, but can’t, you “bite your tongue.” the sharp, quick pain of anxiety – a desire that can’t be sated. the need to urinate. when someone tells you something that makes no sense and you can’t contradict it, you become “sick to your stomach.” nauseous, as if suffering from vertigo – which [...]
About a year of tweets, archived here for posterity.
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure of the 140 character limit of Twitter. I may get a round Tuit and synchronize my use of Twitter with this blog. For now, here’s a dump of [...]
Tastes great, less filling. Hispanic, Latino. Languge as a battlefield. The international scope of post-colonial identity politics.
I should preface this entire argument by noting that, for the most part, I am happy to go by whatever I need to be called in order to advance the interests of a more egalitarian society. Now let’s have some nerdy, wordsmithing fun. Every once in a while I have an interesting exchange with someone [...]
We have little idea how people talked a hundred years ago.
Graham Robb: The problem is, do we know how “a human being” spoke a hundred years ago? Even a perfect recording could not restore the familiar backdrop of the time, the contrastingly normal voices in the foyer, the daily pantomime of gestures and expressions, nor, of course, the theatergoers’ notion of what constituted a “natural” [...]
“Languages differ in what they must convey and not what they may convey.” – Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”
Nothing is solid; gorgeous prose from The Ecomomist
Gorgeous writing from The Economist: The Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms. Water evaporates from the oceans, rains down on the land, pours [...]
art: automatic summaries of books.
AutoSummarize by Jason Huff: “The top 100 most downloaded copyright free books summarized using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function and organized alphabetically.” Remission by Katja Mater: “…I take a picture of the complete content of a book, shooting all pages on one negative…A summary, ending up in a book shaped blur.”