Tags / 52 quotes from 26 sources
#words
12 Untranslatable Words (and Their Translations) | David Shariatmadari | Commentisfree | The Guardian
Lexical fields (structuralism)
The second is the idea of structuralism, in which every part of the structure of a language is related. Think of it like this: the real world is a plain patch of ground, and language is a net we throw over it. Each time the net falls, every one of the diamond-shaped holes lands…
Meaning of snow for eskimos
“We have [In English] the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Hedge (vocabulary)
hedge
Cursory (vocabulary)
cursory
Accruing (vocabulary)
accruing
Pipedreams (vocabulary)
pipedreams.
Pwned (vocabulary)
pwned,
Building The Next New York Times Recommendation Engine - The New York Times
Collaborative topic modeling applied to the new york times
It turns out that straddling both techniques can give us the best of both worlds. We built an algorithm inspired by a technique, Collaborative Topic Modeling (CTM), that (1) models content, (2) adjusts this model by viewing signals from readers, (3) models reader preference and…
Calvinism (wikipedia Contributors)
God is infinite, and finite people are incapable of comprehending an infinite being
Reformed theologians believe that God communicates knowledge of himself to people through the Word of God. People are not able to know anything about God except through this self-revelation. Speculation about anything which God has not revealed through his Word is not…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Quando i fatti scavalcano le parole
“Astrid, aspetta!” ho detto, mentre le correvo dietro attraverso il prato. Gli altri ci guardavano, tra costernazione da gioco finito male, amarezza da regole sociali violate, incredulità per come i fatti avevano preso il sopravvento sulle parole.
Epigrams On Programming
Pictures and the limits of 10K words
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
Programming as punning
Like punning, programming is a play on words.
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
We are what we eat, but what we eat is also a reflection of who (we think) we are
We are what we eat, but what we eat is also a reflection of who (we think) we are. In other words, the stories we tell about the things we take into our bodies reflect the stories we tell about our more mysterious selves. [...] This mirroring effect between substance and self…
Fragmentations
Fragmentions: linking to words in a page
What if instead we combined these two ideas: use a fragment to identify part of a page mention words in the page as the identifier I’ve named these “fragmentions” To tell these apart from an id link, I suggest using a double hash — ## for the fragment, and then words that…
Functional And Physical Objects - The Big Picture
Karl popper's three worlds of knowledge
World 1: There is, first, the world that consists of physical bodies: of stones and of stars; of plants and of animals; but also of radiation, and of other forms of physical energy. I (Karl Popper) will call this physical world ‘world 1’. World 2: There is, secondly, the mental…
How Books Will Become Machines
The core business model of search engines is about selling words
If search engines become the most direct way to discover books, writers will be encouraged to adapt their style and chosen vocabularies in consequences, reusing, for instance, words often searched or choosing them based on marketing considerations. We will progressively…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
Religious and moral feelings are (forgotten) associations of simpler emotions
Association.—All strong feelings are associated with a variety of allied sentiments and emotions. They stir up the memory at the same time. When we are under their influence we are reminded of similar states and we feel a renewal of them within us. Thus are formed habitual…
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
Suocera e cognato, parole da temere
Lei non risponde; sta pensando ai termini inglesi e italiani che indicano le relazioni familiari acquisite. Le forme inglesi mother-in-law e father-in-law e sister-in-law eccetera le sembrano frutto di una logica coerente, che come una spada a due lame da un lato ti offre una…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Example of objects
When I use my pen to ink marks onto this piece of white paper, the action of writing or 'inking' is an operation of distinction whereby I bring forth the inked words on the page. So 'inking' as an action is the operation of distinction I can consensually enact and the inked…
The previous statement entails that the assumption of an objective reality is a "miss-take"
In other words, if we take seriously the fact that in the experiential domain this distinction is impossible, then it follows that we cannot rely - for the validation of our arguments - on any assumption that entails having a privileged or direct access to 'outside' objects…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Tetsugaku: tradurre la parola filosofia
Nishi si interessa soprattutto alla filosofia. La considera regina delle scienze, un’asserzione che parrebbe fichtiana, se non fosse per lo sfondo positivistico in cui si inscrive. Fu Nishi a imporre la sua traduzione giapponese del termine «filosofia» (philosophia). Non fu una…
Chigau: errore e differenza insieme
Chigau. «Errore», ma anche «differenza», a far capire che l’anticonformismo in Giappone è pernicioso.
Do: la Via e il metodo
Do (michi). Traduce il cinese tao. Stile di vita, ma anche la Via in cui tutti gli esseri incedono. Come suffisso ricorre nel senso di metodo (judo: Via della gentilezza).
Zen come eccellenza (definizione)
Zen. Da non confondersi con l’omonima scuola buddhista, indica il bene o l’eccellenza, ed è scritto con un diverso carattere.
Medieval Semiotics (meier-oeser, Stephan)
Words signify, as it were, infinitely many things
Even if impositio in the described sense is of pivotal importance for the constitution of linguistic meaning, the signification of words is by no means limited to it: “a vocal expression signifies many things for which it is not imposed, as it signifies all those things that…
Bacon distinguishing two modes of imposition: formal and tacit
Bacon intends to solve the resulting difficulties (which every causal theory of meaning based on the concepts of ‘reference setting’ and ‘reference borrowing’ has to face) by distinguishing two modes of imposition. This can be seen as his most inventive contribution to…
Anselm of Canterbury : verbum mentis + mental concepts
In the late 11th century Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) revived the Augustinian doctrine of the verbum mentis, combining it with the Aristotelian view on mental concepts outlined in the opening chapter of Peri Hermeneias. Thus, the two aspects of the mental word — which are…
Augustine advocates the devaluation of spoken word and written sign in favor of mental concept
In close analogy to this devaluation of the written word against the spoken one, Augustine in his later theory of verbum mentis (mental word) is advocating the devaluation of the spoken word and the external sign in general against the internal sphere of mental cognition. It is…
The universality of the concept of sign is counterbalanced by the emphasis laid on the mental sign
The universality of the concept of sign, according to which in some respect “anything in the world is a sign” (omnis res mundi est signum) (Peter Margallus, Logices utriusque scholia, 1520, 146f.), is counterbalanced by the emphasis laid on the mental sign (signum mentale)…
Bacon abandons the model of the semantic triangle: words signify the things themselves
2) In his account of signification of words regarding their ‘impositio’ Bacon accentuates the arbitrariness of meaning.[28] But even though the first ‘impositor’ (name-giver) is free to impose a word or sign on anything whatsoever, he does perform the act of imposition…
Ockham's logic and the mentalization of sign
Ockham's logic marks an important, though not the only important, step in the process that might be described as a progressive ‘mentalization’ of sign. The idea behind this process is the contention that without some sort of ‘intentionality’ the phenomena of sign, signification…
Boethius commenting on Aristotle
in his more elaborate second commentary on Peri Hermeneias, Boethius discusses at length the interrelations between the four elements of linguistic semeiosis mentioned by Aristotle, i.e., between external objects or things (res), mental concepts or representations (passiones…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Each word contributes to the truth condition
Everybody agrees that each component, “Socrates” and “water,” makes a contribution to the total truth condition of the thought. “Socrates” picks out Socrates and “water” refers to water.
Knowing what words mean
There are then two sets of questions about the components of the thought. First, how does each element relate to the condition that it determines and second, how does the agent relate to the determination of those conditions? Granted that “Socrates” refers to Socrates and…
Philosophy Of Information - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information
According to Luciano Floridi, four kinds of mutually compatible phenomena are commonly referred to as "information": - Information about something (e.g. a train timetable) - Information as something (e.g. DNA, or fingerprints) - Information for something (e.g. algorithms or…
Rdf Primer
A vocabulary is a set of URIrefs
Since RDF uses URIrefs instead of words to name things in statements, RDF refers to a set of URIrefs (particularly a set intended for a specific purpose) as a vocabulary. Often, the URIrefs in such vocabularies are organized so that they can be represented as a set of QNames…
Sexuality And Gender In The Classical World - Readings And Sources
Aphrodisia, eros and philia
Sexual intercourse was aphrodisia, "the things of Aphrodite"...sexual desire could be denoted by general words for desire, but the obsessive desire for a particular person was eros... Plato finds it philosophically necessary in Phaedrus and Symposium to treat eros a respons to…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
A tawdry business, gangster-style
The whole hanging-the-cunt-up-over-the-acid thing, it was all a bit—what did you call it, Salman? What was the word?’ ‘Tawdry,’ Salman suggested. ‘Yeah. Taw-fuckin-dry the whole thing. Farid, he likes to get respect, or cut to the chase and gun the motherfucker down, like. So,
Karla's journal of fragments
Knowing that I shouldn’t, I turned through the pages and read her private thoughts. It wasn’t a diary. There were no dates on any of the pages, and there were none of the day-to-day accounts of things done and people met. Instead, there were fragments. Some of them were culled…
The jinx of "It's gonna be okay"
The horse was making me look good. It’s gonna be okay, I whispered to myself, knowing, as the words trotted through the thick fog of vain hope in my mind, that I’d uttered the certain jinx formula.
Lovers hear how things are said, not what
And I should’ve listened to her—she told me almost nothing, but she did give me clues, and I know now that she put signs in her words and expressions that were as clear as the constellations over our heads. But I didn’t listen. It’s a fact of being in love that we often pay no…
Synonym - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
No two synonyms mean exactly the same
Synonyms are words with the same or similar meanings. [...] An example of synonyms are the words begin and commence. Likewise, if we talk about a long time or an extended time, long and extended become synonyms. In the figurative sense, two words are often said to be synonymous…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Our language reveals how proactive we are
Our language, for example, is a very real indicator of the degree to which we see ourselves as proactive people.
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The world as lila, meaningless play
in the Vedanta the whole world is seen as the lila and the maya of the Self, the first word meaning “play” and the second having the complex sense of illusion (from the Latin ludere, to play) magic, creative power, art, and measuring—as when one dances or draws a design to a…
IT cannot be made an object
The difficulty is not only that language is dualistic, insofar as words are labels for mutually exclusive classes. The problem is that IT is so much more myself than I thought I was, so central and so basic to my existence, that I cannot make it an object. There is no way to…
Many things which we felt to be basic realities of nature are social fictions
We have now found out that many things which we felt to be basic realities of nature are social fictions, arising from commonly accepted or traditional ways of thinking about the world. These fictions have included: 1. The notion that the world is made up or composed of…
From the Ceramic Model to the Crackpot Model
Another powerful image is the Ceramic Model of the universe, in which we think of it as so many forms of one or more substances, as pots are forms of clay, and as God is said to have created Adam from the dust. This has been an especially troublesome image, bewildering…
Death as the off interval of a pulsation
Is it possible that myself, my existence, so contains being and nothing that death is merely the “off” interval in an on/off pulsation which must be eternal—because every alternative to this pulsation (e.g., its absence) would in due course imply its presence? Is it…
We notice only what we can name
It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed. Notation is a system of…
The Elements Of Style - Wikipedia
Vigorous writing is concise
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences…
The Tao Of Topic Maps
A topic can be anything whatsoever
What then is a topic? A topic, in its most generic sense, can be any “thing” whatsoever — a person, an entity, a concept, really anything — regardless of whether it exists or has any other specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by any means…
Universal Grammar
Universal grammar's implicational rules
Universal Grammar is made up of a set of rules that apply to most or all natural human languages. Most of these rules come in the form of "if a language has a feature X, it will also have the feature Y." Rules that are widely considered as part of UG include: If a language is…