Wouldn't normally post to anything at FreeThoughtBlogs, but this post by Crommunist on "political [in]correctness" is the best summary of the issues involved I've yet read.

I have made the observation before, but I was just reminded how similar the questions "What is a language?" and "What is a species?" are.

Ligers exist, as do tiglons, and females are fertile. Dutch is a language and Swiss German isn't. We name things in ways that aren't rigorous and then use the terms as if they have rigor.

Is "hissy," or the long form "had a hissy fit," a regionalism? I don't have a problem putting it in Leonard McCoy's mouth, and I know better than to put it in Ianto Jones's, but would Kirk say it? Peter Venkman? Sheriff Jack Carter? Captain Jack Harkness? Douglas Fargo? Perfect Tommy? Elwood Blues ( Read more... )

(Sorry about the friendslist-spamming, y'all. Last one tonight, I promise.)

There is a world of difference between "it was not meant to be" and "it was meant not to be."

An awful lot of people say the former when they actually mean the latter.

I stumbled across a new word! (This is a relatively rare phenomenon for me, so I try to journal about it when it happens.)

Propertarians - broadly, those who advocate the legal private ownership of property; more specifically, those who believe that all zero-sum goods can be and should be owned, and that the right of ownership is the most ( Read more... )

Any excuse for me to think about Proto-Indo-European roots and sex at the same time, right? I mean, we could get some number theory in there and we'd have everything I loved about college going on at once.

( Linguistic putterings in Eros's courtyard behind the cut )

With all respect to George Clinton (and, for that matter, En Vogue), free your ass and your mind will follow. Good, hot sex that breaks a taboo is the best mind-expanding trip there is. Even better than sleep deprivation, caffeine, and too much sucrose, good as that is.

So someone said in an IM conversation:

It was very hard to be pro sex when ( Read more... )

I don't remember the contex in which this came up, but during the course of spending the afternoon hanging out at memeslayer's house with most of his social group, someone (cheshirebast, I think?) came up with the concept of "Kawaiinoqatsi" - "Life of cuteness."

Gods help us, we're mashing together Japanese and Hopi now . . .

I hate it when the language codes sexist assumptions (which it does all the time).

Today's irritant:

Consider the two sentences "She mothered the child" and "He fathered the child." These should be exactly parallel sentences, right? The only thing that changes is the gender of the subject, right?

But the first sentence describes what the ( Read more... )

There is, or at least used to be, a movement that went by the name of General Semantics. They're a quirky little group with politics somewhere just to the left of the Objectivists, among other things. But their big idea is that they're against inductive reasoning; it's deductive reasoning or nothing. For that reason, they're also against ( Read more... )