Tag: language update
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British losing θ?
θ is a weak sound, and weak sounds tend to slide down a gradient into silence or into stronger sounds. θ goes to f in many British dialects. Lately I’ve been noticing θ going toward t in some proper London types. This might be an old tendency but I haven’t noticed it before. It’s constantly…
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God believes in ether
Until 1920 most discussion of electricity and radio was based on the assumption of an ether. Michelson-Morley DIDN’T wipe out the ether. It was wiped much later when quantum quackery took over the doctrines and creeds of “science”. Here’s a nice clear example from a 1904 book by Frederick Vreeland, the inventor of the weirdly…
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More fake surprise
Bad grammar is a major component of sneaky propaganda. I don’t mean ain’t or irregardless. I mean distortion of verb aspect. The latest fake surprise is a 75-year-old constant process posing as a freshly discovered sudden unexpected unprecedented brand-new crisis. The feds have arrested two Chinese spies who were running a blackmail factory in NYC,…
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Random grammar thought
Random grammar thought, seems like an interesting correlation at the moment. Among Indo-European languages, the Catholic or Orthodox cultures (Latin, Slavic) prefer reflexive verbs as a way of expressing passive or middle voice. Protestant and Islamic cultures (Germanic, English, Arabic) prefer distinct active and passive forms. Latin started with a distinct passive, then replaced it…
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Bond gender
We’re confused about bonds in the same way that we’re confused about gender. A bond is a contract with a specific time interval. You buy it, let the seller use your money for a specific time, and expect a periodic rental fee from the seller. At the end of the fixed time interval you sell…
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π
π Day again! Since I’m talking typography lately, I’ll hash and rehash a couple items from 2019. = = = = = Thinking about Trump as Pied Piper. When the metaphor first appeared in those DNC emails I didn’t quite understand it. After learning that Trump is Roy Cohn’s protege, I understand it PRECISELY. Agents…
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Anyone could own?
Last week I was trying to show that one individual has always been powerless against the rulers, but an organization or union has always been capable of pushing back against demons. 4. Before Hollerith, record-keeping and calculation were partly mechanized by printing presses and typewriters and abacuses and cash registers. Anyone could own an adding…
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Wrong word, same advice?
Randomly noted in a Reddit topic of ‘useful quotations’… How to survive in a tyranny: Keep your mouth closed and your eyes open. In 1969, Warden Copley gave the new intakes his standard speech. Imagine Edward G. Robinson as a gangster and you’ve got Warden Copley. I heard him say: Keep your mouth closed and…
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Ancient words
Kirn points out yet another reason why you shouldn’t copyright your work if you want to leave a legacy. I hadn’t thought about this part of the problem. He shows parallel passages from Roald Dahl’s novel ‘Witches’, with the latest edition bowdlerized by Woke idiocy. Recently the ancient word usufruct popped into my ancient head…
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whorfles
Now we have more “Chinese” UFOs. After I obediently gave Deepstate the snap reaction it wanted, I turned up my input filters and baseline sensors. This is clearly a rather low-quality fake THREAT, and the repeat is designed to create a new fake threat CATEGORY. Deepstate treats an ordinary and frequent object as a UNIQUE…
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Primly and properly
Speaking of subjunctives… There are lots of old jokes about proper prim Bostonians. Maybe they’re right. Motor Age in 1909 has some pretty pictures of the motoring conditions around President Taft’s “summer capital” in Beverly. Nice Stickley typography. I’d say the summer capital is almost large enough to hold Taft. Alongside this picture: the article…
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Hardwired doesn’t need marks
This is intriguing but dubious. Researchers looking closely at some cave paintings of elk and antelope have been puzzled by periodic markings around the animals. These researchers see a correlation between the 13 months of the lunar calendar and the mating cycles of the animals. First: When people are intensely interested in a set of…
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More on Stalin and language
Continuing from here with Stalin’s remarkable essay on language. The PDF includes several letters written to various academicians after the ‘Ask Me Anything’ session at Pravda. In one of those letters he deals with the silly gesture-first idea, which was apparently popular among Soviet academicians at that time. = = = = = START STALIN:…
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Good knockdown of a silly idea!
This article on the origin of language is sensible but sort of surprising. Apparently the idea that language started from gestures is becoming more common, and might even be the consensus assumption now. The first paragraph is eloquent: Some say language evolved by firelight, with our ancestors sharing stories deep into the night. Others suggest…
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From an extremely same/different era
After finding the origin of ringers in this 1927 volume of Vanity Fair I started reading the rest of the magazine. 1927 was the peak of a Share Value boom, so it was like 2017 as measured by aristocrats. The two booms are drastically different as measured by peasants. 1927 was overgrown from a REAL…
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