[CLUE-Talk] Looks like our brains match \w+

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 14:00, Jeff Cann wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 September 2003 9:12 am, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> > It's only a matter of time before we devolve back to communicating in
> > pictograms anyway....
> 
> You sound so Orwellian today, Joe.  I'm feeling double plus good about the 
> changes to our language.

I'm uneasy about the direction our language is taking, but I also know
that plenty of people were made uneasy by writing and the printing
press, so... it's kind of hard to predict whether a shift to pictograms
would be a bad thing or not.

On the one hand, we tend to process images more easily than text
anyway... but on the other hand, it's much more difficult to convey
abstract concepts using images than it is using words. 

> On a serious note, I do know that languages are ephemeral, so we don't have 
> much to do about it.  I'm still pissed about the acceptance of the word 
> "ain't" and people who use 'who' as a preposition (instead of whom).

"Ain't" doesn't bother me... if it was good enough for Mark Twain, it's
good enough for me. There are plenty of other little things that drive
me nuts, though -- like people using "over" and "under" to mean "more
than" or "less than" or the fact that very, very few people seem to
understand the difference between "its" and "it's." 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net