Life Less Literary

Great song, great vid: Freeland “We Want Your Soul“

I’m sorry if anybody has tried and failed to post any comments the last couple of days - I went over my disk quota (that I set myself, stupid dolt that I am - who’d have thought I’d ever need more than 333mb???)

It should be OK now.

What am I thinking of - no fucker ever posts comments here. Please begin now.

Next Wednesday, 1st October, is Cultivate an Aura of Mystery Day. That’s all I’m saying on the matter.
(thanks Auriea)

Here’s an interesting article on the analytical language created by John Wilkins in the Seventeenth Century. And here’s an excerpt:

He divided the universe in forty categories or classes, these being further subdivided into differences, which was then subdivided into species. He assigned to each class a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example: de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element fire, a flame. In a similar language invented by Letellier (1850) a means animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivore; abiv, horse; etc. In the language of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) imaba means building; imaca, harem; imafe, hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imari, house; imaru, country house; imedo, coloumn; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imogo, window; bire, bookbinder; birer, bookbinding.

I wonder what life would be like with such a language. On the one hand, the encyclopaedic nature of the very words we speak would make learning a more rational task (and I’ve no doubt it would make certain forms of linguistic computer programming easier too), but on the other I can’t help thinking that so many words that were so similar could only confuse matters. Also, knowing how hard it is to come up with decent categorisation schemes, I’ve no doubt that this one would seem out-of-date as soon as it had been set in stone. The article goes on to state that in a certain Chinese encyclopaedia:

animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

In light of which, you have to wonder how much an encyclopaedic language would blinker us into one way of seeing the universe?

An interesting metaphor that seems to be increasing in useage: Technical Debt - doing technical things the quick and dirty way incurs technical debt which, like financial debt, requires interest payments in the future.

I love etymology, as you may have noticed from some of my recent Merriam Webster entries. I also love cranky swear-words and terms of abuse, words like pillock, git and berk. So this page from H2G2 giving the origins of various British swear words is an absolute gift! I don’t need any more Christmas presents now.

A couple of months ago, I found a dead moth in the living room. Rowan
pinned it to a board "like the ones in the museum". A few days later,
another one followed it. Yesterday I found another big one and pinned
that on too. Gill spotted it and thought it funny, dug around and found
another one, then I checked all the window-sills and managed to add
some flies, wasps and a bee. Then Gill took them all off the board,
glued one some sacking material, and pinned them back in again. Rowan
and Lola thought it was hilarious. Rowan wants to exhibit it to the
public so… here you go, public.

I was up late-ish (later than Gill, anyway) coding tonight - and as I was about to go to bed, the News 24 coverage of the Brent East by-election results swung into action. I couldn’t help hanging around to see a little bit of what might just be history. But I was knackered, and at around 1am I drifted into sleep…

By some quirk of fate, I woke from a dream (which I don’t remember at all, let alone as clearly as this morning’s) 30 seconds before the returning officer stepped up to start reading the results at 2.30am. This being a by-election, and the first in a long time, there were plenty of bizarre candidates to step up onto the stage. One of the first up, dressed something like a laughing cavalier, yelled as he arrived on stage “they think it’s all over, it is now”. I cringed in my seat - it felt like one of those things which people think up in a moment of apparent clarity, then spend months planning for, only to find that, when their moment of glory comes, it wasn’t one-tenth as funny as it seemed inside their head. So I was a little surprised when I found out that this person was Aaron Barschak, whose main claim to fame was succesfully gatecrashing Prince William’s 21st birthday party dressed as Osama bin Laden, but who also claims to be a comedian. This, and Barschak’s antics throughout the count, were so unfunny they were painful. I can only think that he must’ve been being post-post-post-ironic, or something.

Anyway, the elections were decent viewing, the Lib Dem’s win a deserved one, and I realised that funnily enough there are few things I enjoy more than watching politicians get their moment of glory and jubilation (the night of 1st May 1997 was one of infectious euphoria and regrettable dancing).

Bad taste? Possibly, but these souvenir replicas of buildings such as the World Trade Centre, the Unabomber’s cabin and the Paris tunnel where Princess Diana lost her life are surely destined to become collectors’ items.

“Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice sharp bones to stick in his eyes.”
Kendo proverb

(thanks Phil! Thanks Scot!)