In the college dining room, there used to be a sign saying “all of the vegetables that we serve are fresh”—a positive, healthy message. At some point, someone must have complained that frozen peas or similar were being served, as the sign was changed to the much less positive “most of the vegetables that we serve are fresh”.
Archive for the ‘Language’ Category
Double Meaning
Friday, October 29th, 2010The Two Cultures (1)
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010In a recent Guardian article, Bonnie Greer suggests that Kurt Gödel “had shown the world years before that nothing can be 100% proven” (“Me and Sister Carmela”, 20th September). In fact, what he showed was the subtly different notion that not 100% of true statements (of a particular, broad class of mathematical statements) can be proven.
This is not just a pedantic factual correction. Frequently, mathematicians (and practitioners of other rigorous reasoning systems) are attacked in the media for their arrogance. This is often characterised as an assumption that “everything” can be shown to be true or false with 100% certainty. By contrast, only specific types of statements are amenable to mathematical methods; furthermore, even within that domain, not everything will be provable!
In particular, the elision of words used in some specific technical way (“proven”, “statement”) to imply that these narrow technical results magically mean something about the day-to-day meaning of these words is ubiquitous. It is not the mathematicians who are at fault in such situations, as they are precise about the narrowness of the applicability of their results.
It could be argued that it is the practitioners of the literary arts that are guilty of the arrogant over-reach that mathematicians are frequently blamed for: consider the slapdash use of metaphor to extend the reach of statements, overinterpretation of the meaning of technical notions based on mere co-incidence of words, and drawn out discussions that amount to little more than extended puns. This is ultimately destructive to both the understanding of science and literature and to attempts to create a meaningful dialogue between the disciplines.
We* Blog
Friday, August 20th, 2010Just saw the word “weblog” for the first time in ages—the abbreviation “blog” has basically taken over completely. Interestingly, I read it as “we blog”. This is quite a neat pun, which I am struggling to get my head around: “weblog” gets abbreviated to “blog” which then means that “weblog” looks like “we blog” which is itself an abbreviation of “we weblog” and so on…
btw The * symbol is the Kleene Star.
Pronouns and Pro-verbs in Command-Line Interfaces
Friday, January 8th, 2010I wonder how hard it would be (and how useful) to have concepts like pronouns in command-line interfaces. For example I often find myself typing something like:
mv file.tla /foo/bar/fnord/plugh/xyzzy/
cd /foo/bar/fnord/plugh/xyzzy/
Would it be possible to use a something like a pronoun in place of the long string in the second command:
mv file.tla /foo/bar/fnord/plugh/xyzzy/
cd there
where the semantics of there are roughly “the last thing referred to in a previous command”.
Along similar lines, some natural languages (I understand Japanese is an example) have the idea of “pro-verbs,” that is, words which stand in for verbs: “I ate some cake, it was nice, [pro-verb] some biscuits.”. Could we, similarly, have such a concept on the command-line, say rep for repeat:
grep -i "University of Rummidge" *.txt
rep ../old/*.txt
These ideas are vaguely appealing; but, would they be used enough to justify them being included? Also, it is easy to give a couple of examples where they work well; but how would they generalise? Say, I wanted to refer to the second-last thing in the previous command line, or use most of the previous command but change one of the command-line switches? Would it be easy to do all this in a way which is easy-to-use? Or would it get hopelessly complicated too quickly?
Surnames: Birds and Animals
Saturday, November 7th, 2009Why are there a a large number of surnames in English based on birds (Swan, Finch, Quail, Parrott, Woodcock, Peacock, Duck, Chicken and so on; perhaps also Swift, Swallow etc. but these might have other meanings) and in related languages (German has Pelikan for example), whereas the range of animal-based names is smaller (Fox is the only example that comes immediately to mind; I have never come across people with surnames like cow, sheep, pig,dog, cat)?