Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Thursday, November 14, 2024

Sensible Style: Writing in the 21st Century

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Last week I reread Steven Pinker's THE SENSE OF STYLE (2014), subtitled "The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Cen...
Thursday, June 27, 2024

Language in Historical Fiction

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I've just finished watching Season Four of THE CHOSEN, the streaming series about Jesus and his followers. (It seems likely the title re...
Thursday, March 07, 2024

Misunderstood Archaisms

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Confronted with yet another stretch of several rainy days in a row, I'm reminded of the passage in the New Testament that illustrates di...
Thursday, February 15, 2024

Gender Pronouns in SF

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This week T. Kingfisher's new horror novel, WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT, was published. Sequel to WHAT MOVES THE DEAD (a retelling of "The...
1 comment:
Thursday, December 14, 2023

Decoding Brain Waves

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Can a computer program read thoughts? An experimental project uses AI as a "brain decoder," in combination with brain scans, to ...
Thursday, May 04, 2023

Telepaths and Language

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One panel I attended at this year's RavenCon was about communicating with aliens. I brought up the question of whether a telepathic spec...
Thursday, June 30, 2022

Communicating with Pets

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Netflix has a new series called THE HIDDEN LIVES OF PETS. Although it sounds as if it should reveal what our pets do when we're not watc...
Thursday, June 09, 2022

Types of Telepathy

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In reading THE SCIENCE OF STAR TREK, by Mark Brake, I'm naturally reminded of Vulcan telepathy (not discussed much if at all in this boo...
1 comment:
Thursday, February 24, 2022

Verbicide

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The final chapter of C. S. Lewis's STUDIES IN WORDS shifts from the narrowly focused topics of the rest of the book (each chapter delvin...
1 comment:
Thursday, February 03, 2022

Gender Pronouns

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Several years ago at a con session on the fantastic Pixar movie INSIDE OUT, starring personified emotions, someone in the audience asked why...
Thursday, November 11, 2021

Taboos as Time Goes By

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I've been musing over the past couple of days about social taboos, particularly constraints on language. The latter especially affect wr...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 01, 2021

Talking with Aliens

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When extraterrestrials visit our planet, or vice versa, will we be able to communicate with them? This article discusses the issue of learni...
Thursday, June 17, 2021

Canine Conversations

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A speech language pathologist, Christina Hunger, claims to have taught her dog, Stella, to "talk": Can That Dog on Instagram Rea...
Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Afterthoughts Part 3 - Grimdark in Genre Fiction

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Afterthoughts Part 3 Grimdark in Genre Fiction   Part 1  https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/04/afterthoughts-part-1.html Part 2 ht...
Sunday, June 13, 2021

Hacker Ways And The Decline of Language

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Decadent thought leads to decadent language, which leads to even more decadent thought... and a vicious vortex of decay and corruption ensue...
Thursday, May 06, 2021

Me Tarzan, You Jane

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Recently I've watched several Tarzan movies, including two of the classic Johnny Weissmuller films. It's always annoyed me that this...
Thursday, August 08, 2019

An Ethical Duty of Civility?

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The National Conference of State Legislatures publishes a magazine called (appropriately) the STATE LEGISLATURE MAGAZINE. Their July/August ...
Saturday, April 27, 2019

Unjust Deserts

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This opinion piece is not about a miscarriage of justice in the dunes, but about the destructive power of repetition of a particular word: ...
Thursday, April 05, 2018

Telepaths and Language

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I've been reading the early books in the Honor Harrington series. The one I'm into now, ASHES OF VICTORY, includes a conversation ab...
Thursday, April 20, 2017

The Problem with "They"

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Nowadays it's not uncommon to meet people who don't identify with either pole of the standard "he" and "she" bin...