Crazy Language

I found this somewhere in the internet: Let's face it: English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins were not invented in England or french fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig... read more

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about language, how it works, and how it effects our acceptance of new ideas. In the past couple of days I've seen a whole bunch of links crop up via RSS related to this very subject, so here they are collated in one place as a reminder to myself. If anyone else is interested, too, that's all well and good! Here's an interesting article based on a scientific paper, written with quite a few philosophical ideas in mind: Why do some people resist science? "the...

I just thought about it. If I go back to school, I want to pick up Russian as a language. I've always been interested in their culture. Ok, and their men, but that was much later. ;) Anyway, most of the characters I play in roleplaying games are Russian, so I think it would be nice to at least know the language more. Maybe they have classes outside of regular college? That would be neat. Cyrillic is such a pain to learn to write in though. Dave sent me an email to LinkedIn . Looks like it's a professional...

Expect this entry to spread. http://languageisavirus.com/ Think Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerourac. Think Laurie Anderson. Think Bernadette Mayer. Think Anais Nin and Marcel Duchamp. Think surrealism, dadaism & automatic writing. Think sipping on a Michelle Tea reading. Think outline if I can. Like this: Cure writer's block "Language is a virus from outer space..." - William S Burroughs Creative Writing Toys - Authors - Post your Poetry & Fiction - Creative Writing Exercises & Prompts...

Today I ate lunch at our little local sushi dive, and I said "Origato" to the waiter when he brought me my food. He said "Thank you" back. I think I used the wrong language. Not defeated, I later asked him if I should say thank you in any particular language for this place, but he said it's a mixture of Korean, Chinese, and others, so "Thank you" was fine. I could have said "Shiye shiye," "Duo shiye" or "Kamsa hamnida," but I got the impression that the common language was English, and that is what...

A very interesting PDF presentation about the future of the D language: http://s3.amazonaws.com/dconf2007/WalterAndrei.pdf It comes from the first D conference, just finished: http://d.puremagic.com/conference2007/speakers.html Some commentents on the WalterAndrei presentation: http://while-nan.blogspot.com/2007/08/future-of-d-is-aaargh-my-eyes.html