References in my thesis

[assaultdoor]

1. BBC radio comedy Old Harry's Game: Quote from Satan on page 1
   
2. Dave Barry Slept Here: October 8 as a key example in section 1.2
   
3. The Matrix: "There is no spoon" reference in the Motivation section
   
4. Space Ghost Coast to Coast: Zorak paraphrased in the Theory chapter
   
5. Father Ted: used as an example in a footnote in the Theory chapter
   
6. The Frost

Comments

[anonymous]

I asked you about your use of ellipses in the Steampunk trilogy and you said you use them "when the only other thing I could say would be `Fuck!'" This was at the 2004 APE.

The context was that the programming language my students were learning used "words" and "sentences" as two of the basic ways of storing and manipulating data. The idea is that students will already be familiar with the idea of words and sentences, so the won't freak out or have to think as hard as they might otherwise. Unfortunately, there are a few aspects of words and sentences in this language that don't really appear in English or any other human language that I can think of. One that I was looking at was the idea of an empty word or sentence (a word with no letters or a sentence with no words). Empty things really threw students. They didn't really understand what they were or how they worked and didn't think empty words were real words. A lot of students assumed that they could ignore empty words and sentences when it was convenient to do so, since they didn't contain any useful information. I was trying to find cases in which zero words were used to convey some significant bit of information, and ellipses came to mind.