This page is a temporary assembly point for material that may find its way to /lexicon/, its own dedicated Folder at oook.info. The runup to today's beginning seems to start with the 17i25 yellow page entry, and snowball-like then led to the following lexemes being minuted (as relevant to the array of words in play of the present) in the succeeding fortnight of yellow-pad writing:
unseemly
wabi-sabi
Bros (as in 'Techbros')
NPC ('non-playing character')
-ware (nod to Rudy Rucker)
Agency
Tar Baby
Algorithm
Cyber and Cyber-
reprehensible
recrudescence ("...the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve")
affordance
macramé
The Bully Pulpit
sin vergüenza ('without shame', but deeper)
...
(some of those are definitely of Zeitgeist, some are personal fascinations; each could spawn a mini-essay)
And there are phrases that qualify as le mot juste of the moment:
...the dialectic of bullying and toadying... (Neal Ascherson at LRB, 2017)
(I'll keep eyes and ears peeled for more of same)
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A bout of googly due diligence with 'lexicon' makes it evident that mine is a personal use of the term, having to do with words and phrases significant in one's own thought an speech. Among other senses, there is "the lexicon" as a grand collection (e.g. the OED, or lexicons of Greek, or of Biblical material (including Concordances)); and there are lexicons of specialist vocabulary of various sorts; and there's "the lexicon" of words and phrases in play in current discourse (collections of 'keywords' capture a lot of that sense, as below).
Here's some of what my google search turned up:
I did a series of Dictionary blog entries (which could and should be expanded...) in Spring 2020 [and which ought to be part of an eventual section dedicated to Word Books]:
And 20i25 yellow pad entry has some nice text re:lexicon:
Few lexical items are fixed, unchanging, entire and complete [though one might argue that 'mother' is pretty fixed, but extensible: think "mother of invention" and "motherfucker"]. Most lexemes take on flavors and nuances and relationships and connotations as they are used (viz. the emergence of an ironic use of a word or phrase, in which it means more than first meets the eye). Words and phrases have cultural lives [half-lives?], carrying meaning within speech communities but flexing as the present moment requires. You see that readily with memes and jargon, as they are passed around and put to expressive and descriptive use. Words and phrases have histories, and often seem to be attempting to EXPAND their role in language... but just as often if not so noisily some are sinking toward archaic desuetude. Catchphrases that are bobbled and dropped... Epithets that smell of mothballs (remember mothballs?)...
A couple of words that tipped me over the edge in the last few days:
I first encountered the term around 2000 I think, as a sort of musical and digital Burroughsian cut-up, but with a Jamaican jerk flavor. And soon "everything is a mashup" appeared, as a succinct statement of an intellectual ('Copyleft') ideology, and a provocation. See DJ Spooky on remix.
...and along the way I tripped over Lexicon Valley, a Slate podcast "A podcast about language, from pet peeves to syntax" (which ended in 2021, after 107 episodes)
And so we begin to see the scale of what began as an innocent list of tasty and portentous lexical items, but has turned into another Life's Work...
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Several books that seem especially relevant to work with lexicon:
...words that are critical to understanding the modern world. In these essays, Williams, a renowned cultural critic, demonstrates how these key words take on new meanings and how these changes reflect the political bent and values of our past and current society. He chose words both essential and intangible--words like nature, underprivileged, industry, liberal, violence, to name a few--and, by tracing their etymology and evolution, grounds them in a wider political and cultural framework. The result is an illuminating account of the central vocabulary of ideological debate in English in the modern period. (Amazon blurb)
Terrorism, jihad, fundamentalism, blowback. These and other highly charged terms have saturated news broadcasts and everyday conversation since September 11th. But to keen ears their meanings change depending upon who's doing the talking. So what do these words really mean? And what are people trying to say when they use them? (Amazon blurb)
...updates and extends Raymond Williams's classic work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. It updates some 40 of Williams's original entries and adds 86 new entries, ranging from access to youth. The book is both a history of English, documenting important semantic change in the language, and a handbook of current political and ideological debate. (Amazon blurb)
...142 signed entries —from art, commodity, and fundamentalism to youth, utopia, the virtual, and the West – that capture the practices, institutions, and debates of contemporary society (publisher's blurb)
...chronicles the rise of a new vocabulary in the twenty-first century. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be innovators and entrepreneurs, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies, and to become resilient and flexible in the face of the insults and injuries we confront at work. In the midst of increasing inequality, these keywords teach us to thrive by applying the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life. (Amazon blurb)
...arranged glossary style, from from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability—both challenging conventional usage of such often-used terms as prediction and objectivity and introducing such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. (Amazon blurb)
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4ii25
Email from Bryan Alexander reminded me of the Old Samuel Johnson definition of a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge", and I like the sound of the 'harmless' especially. But Johnson's definition goes on from the drudge:
...A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words (via the marvelous johnsonsdictionaryonline.com)
The signification. It's a grand challenge to compose/contrive glosses for items that enter the personal lexicon, and for those alive in public discourse of a speech community. Such exegetical texts might summarize historical emergence and sociocultural cross-linkage, but the real point is to capture the significance of the expression: what does it mean below the surface of its dictionary definition?
Some words enter the lexicon (again, personal and societal) as novelties, neologisms. calques, portmanteau words ...that express some nuance of meaning, and so enhance the language as she is spoke. By lexical innovation, a thing is labeled, acknowledged, instantiated. One encounters new (and new-ish) items all the time, and pauses to wonder about them, to consider whether they have a place in the shifting sands of one's personal lexicon. When one is surprised by a lexical encounter, the appropriate thing to do is write it down and then go in pursuit of detailing the signification...
It's proper to try to enumerate and visualize my stable of sources and sensors, the sites and persons I rely on and trust the veracity of and will at least deign to listen to (and of course there are other potential sources that I disdain). My lexicon thrives upon the incoming: my eyes and ears are attuned to the Messages —many written, many graphical, many aural— that enter my self-designed bubble
of sources of sources through which to view and monitor the rest of humanity (which as an anthropologist, is my remit).
...But meanwhile, some specialist dictionaries by and for sportive lexicographers:
...after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip," and suggested sending troops to make that happen. We'll own it," he said. "We're going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of." It could become "the Riviera of the Middle East," he said.
Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan "deranged" and "nuts." Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was "speechless," adding: "That's insane." While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, "Let's turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago," Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were "a few kinks in that slinky," a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.
Vernacular lexemes appear self-evident, so we unwittingly reify them. But the words and phrases of natural languages comprise a treacherous basis for identifying valid psychological constructs, as I illustrate in emotion research. Like other vernacular lexemes, the emotion labels in natural languages do not have definite, stable, mutually transparent meanings, and any one vernacular word may be used to denote multiple scientifically distinct entities. In addition, the consequential choice of one lexeme to name a scientific construct rather than any of its partial synonyms is often arbitrary. Furthermore, a given vernacular lexeme from any one of the world's 7000 languages rarely maps one-to-one into an exactly corresponding vernacular lexeme in other languages. Words related to anger in different languages illustrate this. Since each language constitutes a distinct taxonomy of things in the world, most or all languages must fail to cut nature at its joints. In short, it is pernicious to use one language's dictionary as the source of psychological constructs. So scientists need to coin new technical names for scientifically derived constructs—names precisely defined in terms of the constellation of features or components that characterize the constructs they denote. The development of the kama muta construct illustrates one way to go about this. Kama muta is the emotion evoked by sudden intensification of communal sharing—universally experienced but not isomorphic with any vernacular lexeme such as heart warming, moving, touching, collective pride, tender, nostalgic, sentimental, Awww—so cute!.
...presents a riveting account of how Christian fundamentalist, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a fierce battle against their progressive counterparts–secularist, reform Jews, liberal Catholics and Protestants–as each side struggles to gain control over such fields of conflict as the family, art, education, law, and politics. Not since the Civil War has there been such fundamental disagreement over basic assumptions about truth, freedom, and our national identity. (Culture Wars: The Endgame Nihilism's Grip on American Democracy James Davison Hunter (2024) at Hedgehog Review
...where we used to think that on political matters you could compromise (unlike on issues of moral truth), suddenly politics had become an arena where ultimate values were at stake. Compromise was now impossible, debate interminable.
...Our emerging common culture is chillingly nihilistic.
"Nihilism," according to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is "not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys." A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.
...believe in opportunity for all students and in the power of public education to transform lives and create a more just and inclusive society...
...in the midst of political conflicts, students have limited opportunities to engage in learning and respectful dialogue on controversial topics, and it's become harder to address rampant misinformation. The highly charged environment has also led to marked declines in support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity. Meanwhile, harassment of LGTBQ youth has increased.
...we found that the conflict was most heightened in politically contested or "purple" communities—schools in districts where the vote in the 2020 election was roughly even. They were far more likely to experience community-level conflict than those in blue or red districts.
...Our society usually does not do well in promoting dialogue about race and equity in ways that are meaningful, productive, and respectful. Consequently, it can be exceedingly difficult for educators to facilitate these discussions with their students. This is challenging work that requires creativity, insight, and empathy. These attacks make it harder to lean into this work. They need that support because we don't want public education to back away from its critical role in protecting our democracy.
"There have always been cultural conflicts but it's become much sharper in the last 20 years thanks to declining trust in institutions that were meant to hold together the cohesion of society, some of the growing inequalities, and most of all the proliferation of technology that enables and indeed encourages people to cluster in their cultural groups." Matthew d'Ancona
...symbolic issues and questions of identity occupy a larger and more antagonistic position in the general culture than they did 10 or 20 years ago.
The relationship between anthropologists' ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoretical discussions. The contributors to this volume reject the premise that ethnographer and informant occupy different and incommensurable “cultural worlds.” Instead they investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists' models and accounts in new ways. (publisher's blurb)
...Now, anything can become a culture war topic. That's because anything can become of symbolic importance and become instrumental in solidifying affective and instrumental ties among people. Don't believe me? Go re-read Swift's Gulliver's Travels!
...in culture wars ridicule and mockery don't unmask the powerful and bring us back to our senses. Rather, they reinforce the affective ties of the tribe or coalition. And so earnestly (or mockingly) one, thereby, keeps the culture war going rather than (ahh) changing the topic.
...If the national electorate was voting to reject the nihilism of campus infatuation with Hamas, DEI gone wild, Drag Queen Story Hour, and the ridiculous "We Believe . . ." yard signs gracing impeccable lawns in gated communities, I applaud. The last four years have revealed the vacuousness of such posturing, and its apocalypse is well-deserved. Only a dedicated member of the VOL could believe in the real value or durability of these gestures.
...Pretending to ourselves that Trump II represents a culture war victory threatens to render traditionalist accounts of the true, the good, and the beautiful incoherent. Several of the celebrities in the Trump II entourage closely resemble villains from the classical Christian education curriculum that I teach; some are hardly even wolves in sheep's clothing and are just outright wolves.
2/11/2025 11:08:12 Green energy and high-speed rail enthusiast based in Central Luzon, PH (26M, US expat). Seeking a serious partner (20-45F) with intelligence, wisdom and fun to put wind in my turbine blades. American Prospect subscription not essential, but a nice bonus.
2/11/2025 11:09:13 Harried federal government manager (as of now at least) (47, Denver) seeks F30-50 for fun and LTR. Enjoys hiking, biking, and history. Must hate dogs and actively work for their downfall.
I'm more lexicologist than lexicographer, and occasionally I slide toward lexicosophy. Perhaps the typology needs updating, to include lexigeeks, and then perhaps lexiweenies.
The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data
set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816
participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per par-
ticipant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant).
it is appropriate to expand the
horizons of experimental work addressing lexical process-
ing beyond standard factorial experiments that are based
on a relatively limited set of monosyllabic stimuli. The
ELP is such an attempt. The ELP is a large database of
descriptive and behavioral data, along with a search en-
gine that affords access to this database. The ELP involves
a multiuniversity collaborative effort to provide a large
database of naming and lexical decision latencies across
1,260 participants for 40,481 words and nonwords.
The Internet has greatly changed the way we communicate. Since body language and verbal tone do not translate in our text messages or e-mails, we've developed alternate ways to convey nuanced meaning. The most prominent change to our online style has been the addition of two new-age hieroglyphic languages: emoticons and emoji.
...Japanese conglomerate SoftBank actually released the first set of emojis in 1997... In order to attract Japanese customers, Apple hid an emoji keyboard in the first iPhone back in 2007, but North American users quickly became aware of the keyboard.
Social media companies play a significant role in the perpetuation of doomscrolling by leveraging algorithms designed to maximize user engagement. These algorithms prioritize content that is emotionally stimulating, often favoring negative news and sensationalized headlines to keep users scrolling. The business models of most social media platforms rely heavily on user engagement, which means that the longer people stay on their platforms, the more advertisements they see, and the more data is collected on their behavior. This creates a cycle where emotionally charged content—doften involving negative or anxiety-inducing information—is repeatedly pushed to users, encouraging them to keep scrolling and consuming more content. Despite the well-documented negative effects of doomscrolling on mental health, social media companies are incentivized to maintain user engagement through these methods, making it challenging for individuals to break free from the habit.
The hopecore social trend has blossomed in popularity as a balm for anxious and unpredictable times, inviting people to make a conscious choice to live in the present and find the good in every moment. Naturally, music is providing a fitting soundtrack for the hopecore movement, with tracks centering around eternal themes: the beauty of life and love, the triumph of healing. Here, we've put together a collection of tracks highlighting hopecore's messages, featuring wide-ranging sounds across pop, electronic, R&B and indie; from the looping ambience of Flawed Mangoes to the shoegaze-leaning Rahim Redcar, the hazy funk of Steve Lacy to the saccharine hyperpop of aespa and more.
...I provide not only concrete definitions of word(-form) and lexeme and succinct discussion of the relevant issues, but I also propose two new terms: inventorium (the unpredictable elements of a language) and mentalicon (the elements that a speaker stores in memory). The latter two are crucially different because all speakers store many predictable elements. The four different senses can thus be distinguished clearly by using the four terms word-form, lexeme, inventorial item, and mental item. In the final section of the paper, I note that the term lexicalization also has multiple senses, but its most important sense is inventorization.
Beyond Mesopotamia Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite LRB
Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work? The 11th-century Arabic text on decipherment, The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols, grasped something of this fact. Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all seeking connection with a lost past, or the power to make obscure symbols speak.
...Elam, like Sumeria, is an exochoronym, never used in the region itself. As the first documented polity in what we now call Iran, it remains a lesser-known contemporary of the great Mesopotamian states. Elam is recorded dozens of times in the Bible, where it features as a bellicose but impressive kingdom to the east... The Babylonian records were full of wars with the Elamites.
...Desset argues that one thing the Linear Elamite texts reveal is that the concept of 'Elam' was a Mesopotamian construct, similar to the European notion of 'the Orient'. The ancient inhabitants of the Iranian plateau may have thought of themselves as belonging to an Elamite-speaking (or, as they would have had it, Hatamtite-speaking) cultural world, but not to a country called Elam.
...The Mayanist Michael Coe used to say that three things are necessary to decipher ancient writing. You need lots of examples of the script. You need a good understanding of the cultural context of the writing system. And, most important, you need a bilingual, or better a trilingual, inscription of a known writing system — a Rosetta stone, Ganjnameh or Behistun inscription carved on the orders of a helpful long dead monarch.
...if Desset is correct, Linear Elamite is a phonographic writing system, consisting entirely of signs representing phonemes. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs started out as logogrammatic writing systems, in which the signs record words rather than sounds. Over time they acquired syllabic signs, but they retained logograms and determinatives, which help indicate the semantic class (gods, buildings, professions) to which polyvalent signs belong.
...The word 'decipherment' is in a sense a misnomer. Ancient scripts are not ciphers. They were not designed to be unintelligible to outsiders or intentionally deceive. Ancient inscriptions were written by people following rules that may appear complex, but are no more so than the conventions of our own writing system.
Goidelic word stress is initial but with some signs of quantity sensitivity. Phrasal intonation tends to be falling (for both declaratives and questions) in southern Irish dialects but rising in northern ones. Interrogativity is marked by phonetic adjustments in initial or final accents of the utterance. Icelandic and Faroese have traditional word-initial stress-to-weight but show signs of penultimate stress patterns in loanwords. Intonation is characterized by phrasal accents within overall downtrend patterns (also in questions, but with some accentual distinctions). The polysynthetic structure of the Inuit languages makes the notion of lexical stress irrelevant, but tonal targets are associated with prosodic domains of various kinds, and a distinction is made between word-level and phrase-level tones; devoicing and truncation are utterance final. In Central Alaskan Yupik, primary word stress marks the last foot by pitch movement. Enclitic bound phrases, phrasal compounds, and non-enclitic bound phrases are seen as larger constituents below the utterance.
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. (Andrej Karpathy)
...This all-theory, no-practice attitude posits a sort of rain-dance approach to creation in which one tries different "random changes" without worrying about "comprehension."
...When I first saw "vibe coding," I assumed it was pejorative, meant to mark it off from "real coding," where the coder understands how the code is put together. I was thinking of how vibe was being used back when it was described certain TikToks, as evoking a feeling that can't be pinned down in words, or a claim that couldn't be substantiated with data. Then it was a general word for a mood or a feeling; it seemed to mean the opposite of "having an idea," insofar as having ideas also means being able to slot them into causal relationships. Vibe indicated an inability to analyze a certain situation that is accepted instead as a gestalt, a mystic whole.
"Vibe coding" retains the implication that you can't explain or even understand how something works. But under the pressure of AI hype and its championing of incomprehension, there seems to be not a "vibe shift" but a "vibe" shift occurring, as the term drifts toward a different connotation. Where vibe once conveyed something that can't be analyzed, now it conveys a purposeful indifference to analysis or explanation, as well as to the components that make up something. It is as though the preponderance of vibe talk made explanations irrelevant in all cases, and now we speak of vibes to forbid comprehension, which would be unfun.
"Giving in to the vibe," then, means deliberately refusing to understand, as though that would be to defy AI's supremacy. One should let AI handle the data and the details so that you can just have gratified impulses, which are ultimately just a matter of data being manipulated to your liking— prompting, waiting, tweaking, and trying again until you are satisfied or bored with what you're doing. Being involved with the thinking process, the details, would be to go against the vibe. It's a superfluous burden that sets you against the spirit of the times.
...the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants... Prosody reflects the nuanced emotional features of the speaker or of their utterances: their obvious or underlying emotional state, the form of utterance (statement, question, or command), the presence of irony or sarcasm, certain emphasis on words or morphemes, contrast, focus, and so on. Prosody displays elements of language that are not encoded by grammar, punctuation or choice of vocabulary.
A Universe-of-Discourse (UoD) refers to the specific subject matter or domain of knowledge that is being represented, studied or analysed by a conceptual model. It is the set of entities, concepts, and relationships that are relevant to the problem domain, and it defines the scope and boundaries of the model.
The importance of a UoD to conceptual modelling lies in the fact that it enables the modeler to create an accurate representation of the problem domain. By defining the UoD, the modeler can identify the key concepts, relationships, and constraints that exist within the domain and ensure that the conceptual model reflects these accurately.
(AI answers:) In semantics, the "universe of discourse" refers to the set of entities that a statement or formula is referring to. It is essential for logical reasoning and truth evaluation. The statement "no universe of discourse is a totally fictitious world" is based on the principle that there must be some connection between our language and the world it describes. If the universe of discourse were a totally fictitious world, it would mean that there is no connection between our language and any actual entities or reality.
Here's a big list of words that relate in some way to the minions of Nurgle. There are terms relating to decay, disease, ruin, as well as other characteristic features such as horns, bells, bodily functions, fungi, vermin, twilight, swamps, fog, gardening, and the two extremes of joy and despair, all of which are present among Nurgle's favoured children.
AI defies precise definition, blurred by rapid evolution, our fluid understanding of its capabilities, and the dynamic interplay between humans and technology. Artificial Intelligence, once confined to science fiction, now permeates daily life. This lexicon offers alternative perspectives, reframing AI's monolithic view and illuminating its diverse applications and implications before us.
A deepity, as coined by Daniel Dennett, is a statement that seems both important and true, even profound, but achieves this effect through ambiguity
...The philological study of ancient and classical texts, traditionally the very core of the humanities, has during the last generation or so been either completely marginalized within university departments or, at some universities, even altogether banished from the academic portfolio. This development is partly due to general policies of higher education, but one can argue that it is primarily a consequence of trends within the humanities themselves.
...In his recent book-length poem Context Collapse, which examines how media technologies reshape the kind of poetry that can be made, Ryan Ruby offers this paraphrase/extrapolation of a 1966 paper by computational linguist Margaret Masterman about "toy models of language":
Are two identical sentences, the first produced by a human being and the second by machine intelligence in fact indiscernible? Answer: No ... if two subsequent conditions obtain. (1) The recipient of those sentences is human (the criterion of care) and (2) said human does not know whether the sentence was produced by a human or a machine (the criterion of context). If the same sentence can have different valences —whether semantic or perlocutionary — in different contexts of production or reception, it follows that this will also be true in the noncontext of a machine-produced sentence, or when awareness transforms that noncontext into a paratext which provides a frame for interpreting and understanding it.
I would paraphrase that paraphrase as: machine-generated texts are meaningless in and of themselves without the context of human exchange, regardless of whether they can be syntactically parsed. The meaning of communication, the value of what is communicated depends on, as Farrell puts it the "human relationships mediated through technology" and not the technology itself, whether that is a pile of circuit boards or a pile of phonemes.
Tastes of almost-Friday
LLMs and "creative writing"
Rob Horning at substack
...A critic on Bluesky pointed out that entrepreneurs like Altman "fail to understand that creative writing isn't a slop bucket that needs refilling by any means possible. The reason creative writing is beloved is because it gives us insight into the thoughts and imaginations of fellow humans, not homogenized and plagiarized slurry."
That's probably true, but it may be that people are sometimes seeking an escape from "the thoughts and imaginations of fellow humans" because they are threatened or inconvenienced by having to take other people into account, and what they want is an endless stream of content that negates human creativity and frees them from having to live up to it. In other words, LLMs promise to turn language — ordinarily polyphonous and uncontrollable and irreducibly social — into something more like machine gambling, a solipsistic flow experience that provides an illusion of control by impoverishing the range of experience and reducing it to refilling the slop bucket, over and over again.
Susanne K Langer understood the indispensable power of metaphors, which allow us to say new things with old words
Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic. It is not a development, but a principle.
- from Philosophy in a New Key (1941) by Susanne K Langer
Words are incorrigible weasels; meanings of words cannot be held to paper with the ink.
- from Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III (1982) by Susanne K Langer
Metaphors are double agents. They say one thing and mean another. Their purpose within the symbolic order is to amplify, not deceive – to grow the stock of shared meanings. When we invoke a metaphor, we dislodge words from their literal perch. Our words become ambidextrous, stretched by analogy. We can say new things.
Words are digital symbols transmitted as acoustic signals. The word sequence in an utterance is encoded by a phonological system whose symbol-facing side connects to morpho-syntax, while its signal-facing side controls articulation and perception. This "duality of patterning" (Hockett) or "double articulation" (Martinet) has crucial and little-recognized benefits for accurate transmission, lexical learning, and community convergence.
