A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, “missing letter”) is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel.

Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like Z, J, or X, but it is much more difficult for common letters like E, T or A. Writing this way, the author must omit many ordinary words.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Thanks Ryan! }

Perec is noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter “e.”

It has been translated into English under the title A Void (1994).

The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Both of Georges Perec’s parents perished in World War II. In French, the phrase “sans e” (”without e”) sounds like “sans eux” (”without them”).

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photo { Todd Seelie }

Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge.

{ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind. (…)

The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following definition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). b. That division of any science which describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon, appearance.” In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, albeit only occasionally.

{ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }

Each culture has its agreed-upon list of taboo words and it doesn’t matter how many times these words are repeated, they still seem to retain their power to shock. Scan a human brain, swear at it, and you’ll see its emotional centres jangle away.

Recent research has shown that this emotional impact can have an analgesic effect, and there’s other evidence that strategically deployed swear words can make a speech more memorable. But it’s not all positive. A new study suggests that swear words have a dark side. Megan Robbins and her team recorded snippets of speech from middle-aged women with rheumatoid arthritis, and others with breast cancer, and found those who swore more in the company of other people also experienced increased depression and a perceived loss of social support.

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photo { Calvin Sawer }

University of Oxford Writing and Style Guide decided that writers should, “as a general rule,” avoid using the Oxford comma.

Here’s an explanation from the style guide: As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c.’

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Conatus (Latin for effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving) is a term used in early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics to refer to an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This “thing” may be mind, matter or a combination of both.

Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated by philosophers. Seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, and their Empiricist contemporary Thomas Hobbes made important contributions.

The history of the term conatus is that of a series of subtle tweaks in meaning and clarifications of scope developed over the course of two and a half millennia. Successive philosophers to adopt the term put their own personal twist on the concept, each developing the term differently such that it now has no concrete and universally accepted definition.

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image { 3D Simulation of Gravitational Waves produced by merging black holes, representing the largest astrophysical calculation ever performed on a NASA supercomputer. }

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. (…) Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. (…)

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action. (…)

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

There is an extensive literature dealing with English imperative sentences.

As is well known, these sentences have no overt grammatical subject: (1) Close the door. There is general agreement among scholars that these sentences have deep structures involving an underlying subject, “you,” which is deleted by a transformation.

There is a widespread misconception that utterances such as (2) Fuck you, which also appear to have the form of a transitive verb followed by a noun phrase and preceded by no overt subject, are also imperative. This paper will study the syntax of sentences such as (2).

{ Doug Lemoine | Continue reading }

An Amazonian tribe has no abstract concept of time, say researchers.

The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space - as in our idea of, for example, “working through the night.”

The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognize events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept. (…)

“We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

“Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events. What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

The Amondawa language has no word for “time,” or indeed of time periods such as “month” or “year.”

The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

But perhaps most surprising is the team’s suggestion that there is no “mapping” between concepts of time passage and movement through space.

Ideas such as an event having “passed” or being “well ahead” of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the “mapping hypothesis.” But in Amondawa, no such constructs exist.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

One group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they’ve taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The robots, called LingoDroids, are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don’t share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn’t speak their language.”

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artwork { Thomas Schütte, United Enemies, 1994-95 | fimo, fabric, wood glass and PVC }

Asshole: A man displaying an egocentric disregard for the opinions, needs, and feelings of those around him. He is rude, obnoxious, and self-centered. He thinks he’s a straight-talker who speaks the hard truths that PC wusses aren’t ready for. His bravado typically masks some deep insecurities. It is well documented that women go for assholes. (…)

Douchebag: A dick move may make you a temporary asshole, but a pattern of bad behavior can land you with the unfortunate label of douchebag. (…) Assholes can skate by on charisma, but douchebags rely on belligerence, bullying, and sheer volume to get their way.

{ The Good Men Project| Continue reading }

The sorites paradox (from Ancient Greek: sōreitēs, meaning “heaped up”) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.

The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed.

Is it still a heap when only one grain remains?

If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

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photo { Christian Chaize }

In a notification sent to all service providers and hosting companies in Turkey on Thursday (28 April), the Telecommunication Communication Presidency (TİB) forwarded a list of banned words and terms. (…)

[Some of the banned words:] Adrianne, Animal, Sister-in-law, Blond, Beat, Enlarger, Nude, Crispy, Escort, Skirt, Fire, Girl, Free, Gay, Homemade, Liseli (’high school student’).

{ Bianet | Continue reading }

This study sets out to focus on the nature of changes some major interjections have gone through. (…)

Historically, interjections have been regarded as marginal to language. Latin grammarians described them as non-words, independent of syntax, signifying only feelings or states of mind. Nineteenth-century linguists regarded them as paralinguistic, even non-linguistic phenomena. (…)

Traditional classification of interjections to primary and secondary might help us to narrow down our focus. In keeping with this classification, the words from other word classes (e.g., hell, boy, and Jesus), when used as interjections, construct the category of secondary interjections, and all the other interjections that have already appeared in the dictionary such as wow, oops, ouch, yuck, and whoa form the primary group. The latter interjections are, in point of fact, emotion-expressive so much so that they cannot be expressed by means of other words or phrases.

{ I Will Wow You! Pragmatic Interjections Revisited | Studies in Literature and language | Continue reading | PDF }

Is it true “W” can be used as a vowel?

Sure. Try “how,” which is phonetically equivalent to “hou,” as in house.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

The world’s 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species. (…)

The origin of early languages is fuzzier. Truly ancient languages haven’t left empirical evidence that scientists can study. And many linguists believe it is hard to say anything definitive about languages prior to 8,000 years ago, as their relationships would have become jumbled over the millennia.

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{ The Weather Channel | full story }

The Ides of March is the name of 15 March in the Roman calendar, probably referring to the day of the full moon.

The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months.

In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabbed (23 times) to death in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and 60 other co-conspirators.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | More: Assassination of Julius Caesar }

related { Each of the suspects stabbed Ratchett once, so that no one could know who delivered the fatal blow. }

painting { Vincenzo Camuccini, Morte di Giulio Cesare (Death of Julius Caesar), 1798 }

Verb tense is more important than you may think, especially in how you form or perceive intention in a narrative.

In recent research studied in Psychological Science, William Hart of the University of Alabama states that “when you describe somebody’s actions in terms of what they’re ‘doing,’ that action is way more vivid in [a reader’s] mind.” Subsequently, when action is imagined vividly, greater intention is associated with it. (…)

Those who read that the defendant “was firing gun shots” believed a more harmful intent of the defendant than those who read that he “fired gun shots”.

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screenshot { Cowboys and Aliens, 2011 }

Anyone who sets out to write an essay — for a school or college class, a magazine or even the book review section of a newspaper — owes something to Michel de Montaigne, though perhaps not much. Montaigne was a magistrate and landowner near Bordeaux who retired temporarily from public life in 1570 to spend more time with his library and to make a modest memento of his mind. He called his literary project “Essais,” meaning “attempts” or “trials,” and the term caught on in English after Francis Bacon, the British philosopher and statesman, used it for his own collection of short pieces in 1597. (…)

Oddly, Montaigne learned to speak Latin before he learned to speak anything else, thanks to his father’s strict ideas about schooling. But he chose to write in French, which he expected would change beyond recognition within 50 years, rather than a more “durable” tongue.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Annabel Mehran }

Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.

What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for many others long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I could really count upon or make for ourselves. (…)

Enter the 17th and 18th centuries, when a revolution in human expectations overthrew these old ideas of happiness. It is in this time that the French Encyclopédie, the Bible of the European Enlightenment, declares in its article on happiness that everyone has a right to be happy. It is in this time that Thomas Jefferson declares the right to pursue happiness to be a self-evident truth, while his colleague George Mason, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, speaks of pursuing and obtaining happiness as a natural endowment and right. And it is in this time that the French revolutionary leader St. Just can stand up during the height of the Jacobin revolution in France in 1794 and declare: “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.” In many ways it was.

This perspective lies behind our belief that suffering is inherently wrong, and that all people, in all places, should have the opportunity, the right, to be happy.

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The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some languages do not. Of these, quite a number, mostly in Africa, do not distinguish blue from black either, while there are a handful of languages that do not distinguish blue from black but have a separate term for green.

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painting { Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Green Red, 1962–63 }