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within a specific oral tradition.
Curious: how do you pronounce the word "quixotic?" (I'm not asking the officially correct pronunciation, but rather how you read it in your head. And say it, if you say it ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
Do not count a human dead until you've seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.
Well. That was a surprise. -
propagation into new regions.
A gesture to indicate uppercase letters: extend three fingers toward your listener and traverse the hand with extended fingers across your body spanwise. (The derivation, of course, is from the copyeditor's triple line. A corresponding mark for lowercase follows naturally ( Read more... ) -
practical application of science.
Whenever I leave a message online for someone who's away -- a thing I do with disturbing frequency -- I find myself reminded of this bit from Dune, when Alia does the same thing, only without a computer:
Of all the uses of time-vision, this was the strangest. "I have breasted the future to place my words where only you can hear them," Alia had ( Read more... ) -
deprive of certain characteristics.
Dreamed that I mounted an automatic turret outside my front door to fire rockets at anything that moved. Sadly, I forgot to account for blast radius ( Read more... ) -
linguistic differentiation.
One thing that's been irritating me of late is the semantic drift of the word "shibboleth ( Read more... ) -
artificial or natural components.
One thing I won't miss about Japan: the incredible reliance on manual labor. Spent a couple hours one morning sorting garbage in accordance with Meguro's inscrutable taxonomic poster. My final analysis claimed that there were nine categories of collected garbage and four special cases that had to be delivered somewhere, plus optional stuff like ( Read more... ) -
move or cause to move.
Gene Wolfe:
Every attempt to count them has failed, as has every attempt to tax them systematically. The city grows and changes every night, like writing chalked on a wall. Houses are built in the streets by clever people who take up the cobbles in the dark and claim the ground - did you know that? The exultant Talarican, whose madness manifested ( Read more... )
