461–472 of 472
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
[Matt] Mason's argument was sensible enough: Pirates aren't anti-capitalists, they're punk capitalists. "D.I.Y. encourages us to reject authority and heirarchy, advocating that we can and should produce as much as we consume," Mason writes in the opening chapter of his homage to piracy. "Since punk, this idea has been…
...it can be argued, perhaps, if they wish, that it's a question of style and beauty in the language, and that to make new words and new parts of speech might destroy that. But they cannot argue that respelling the words would have anything to do with the style. There's no form of art form or literary form, with the…
Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: the most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.
All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential…
We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at…
"Media are used by the masses if they have some relevance to everyday life," says Rolf Schulmeister, the educational researcher. "And they are used for aims that people already had anyway." Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking…
Consider some fundamental names: Turing (computation theory and programmable automata), von Neumann (computer architecture), Shannon (information theory), Knuth, Hoare, Dijkstra, and Wirth (programming theory and algorithmics), Feigenbaum and McCarthy (artificial intelligence), Codd (relational model of databases)…
2cThe research approach is strongly empirical. At the workplace of each member of the subject group we aim to provide nearly full-time availability of a CRT work station, and then to work continuously to improve both the service available at the stations and the aggregate value derived therefrom by the group over the…
The time taken to teach the decimalised system for currency, temperature, weights and distances is far shorter and more certain than when 240 pence equalled a pound, 32 degrees Fahrenheit equalled the temperature of ice and pounds and ounces were taught. Already there is a generation that was spared these ancient…
Nevertheless, almost everybody speaks better than he writes. (This also applies to authors.) Writing is a highly formalized technique which, in purely physiological terms, demands a peculiarly rigid bodily posture. To this there corresponds the high degree of social specialization that it demands. Professional writers…
I received a letter today from the "Reading Reform Foundation," which tells me that "23 million (American) adults are functionally illiterate, unable to read an advertisement, a job application, directions on a medicine bottle." They say "30 percent of all schoolchildren have serious reading difficulties." I rather…