#like I get it in theory if u ask me about the syntax I will smile and nod and go to google.com

[bytebun]

ough the horrors ough (basic programming concepts I have forgotten)

[allthingslinguistic]

All Things Linguistic - 2021 Highlights

2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)

I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.

Media and crossovers

How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language – I did a talk for Duolingo’s DuoCon

Why do adults…over 40….use ellipses…so much? Crossover with Tim Blais of Acapella Science

xkcd Tower of Babel

Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French (video with Tom Scott)

PUZZLE SPOILERS: A quote from Because Internet in the New York Times acrostic

Someone made a crossword puzzle of Because Internet!

Peeking face, palm up, and palm down – the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years

Media

BBC Word of Mouth – The Shipping Forecast

I’m cited in a Wikipedia article about boomerspeak

I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period.

Lauren Gawne and I did a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another, featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles

Crash Course Linguistics

The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.

What is linguistics?

What is a word? Morphology

Syntax 1: Morphosyntax

Syntax 2:

Semantics

Pragmatics

Sociolinguistics

Phonetics 1: Consonants

Phonetics 2: Vowels

Phonology

Psycholinguistics

Language acquisition

Language change and historical linguistics

World Languages

Computational Linguistics

Writing Systems

Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!

Lingthusiasm

In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:

Where to get your English etymologies (transcript)

Cool things about scales and implicature (transcript)

Corpus linguistics and consent – Interview with Kat Gupta (transcript)

That’s the kind of episode it’s – Clitics (transcript)

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind (transcript)

A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip (transcript)

Making machines learn Fon and other African languages – Interview with Masakhane (transcript)

Not NOT a negation episode (transcript)

R and R-like sounds – Rhoticity (transcript)

How linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript)

Listen to the imperatives episode! (transcript)

Writing is a technology (transcript)

And here are this year’s bonus episodes:

Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory

Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️

Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia

Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word

Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication

Language under the influence

Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokémon names

Lingthusiasm liveshow: The listener talks back (on backchannelling)

Talking to babies and small children

The episode-episode (reduplication)

Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)

Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet

Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.

I moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.

Contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House, and also attended online conferences,

guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat (summarized in tweet form)

The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern

Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma

Sotheby’s Level Up in Los Angeles (physical)

Unicode Conference in the San Francisco Bay Area (physical), where I did a keynote called “Taking Playfulness Seriously – When character sets are used in unexpected ways” (slides here!).

The Unicode talk isn’t online but a few days later I did a talk on the same topic for Bay Area NLP, for which the video is here.

Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube

Rosemary Mosco Talks to Gretchen McCulloch about Pigeons, a book event at Argo Bookshop

Conferences/events attended:

Linguistic Society of America (LSA) – did a Wikipedia editathon

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Dictionary Society of North America conference

Annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association

WorldCon (physical)

LingComm and LingFest

In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.

LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

Selected tweets

Books and more

A Memory Called Empire and the latest Murderbot novella, Fugitive Telemetry

The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book

History of Swear Words on Netflix

Helpful threads

Analysis of camera angles on tiktok vs youtube (a thread with, unexpectedly, Hank Green)

Generational differences on email salutations, a topic of never-ending public fascination

Threads on conference “homework” and zoom fatigue

Modulo and other obscure English prepositions (a thread)

robot voice in tone languages (short thread)

given that we’ve been living with a giant panda for the past year

Conversation styles

teach students how to email you

Lack of diversity in childhood language acquisition studies

Why kids these days don’t understand file systems

buy your older coworkers a nice linguistics book

A thread about research debt

vocal fry is completely fine

A many-layers-of-screencapped-post citing Because Internet on youth socialization made the front page of Reddit, so I’ve added some further reading

Linguistics fun

Happy feast day of St Gottschalk, patron saint of “languages, linguists, lost vocations, princes, translators”

A thread of linguistics versions of the roses are red meme

Ellipses in vintage recipes

Not Haunted: new favourite example of implicature

Vaccinated every 8 seconds: new favourite example of quantifier scope ambiguity

A bagel with cream cheese: new favourite example of structural ambiguity

In appfreciation opf pfinally being pfurnished with the Pfizer vaccine I will be pfroducing all opf my voiceless bilabial stopfs and pfricatives as apffricates pfor the next pfortnight.

“you may injure…” new favourite example of deontic vs epistemic modality

garden path ads

Linguistics takes on the “for the better, right?” Padme/Anakin meme

lips are a social construct

linguists are really not kidding when they say that your command of language enables you to understand sentences never before said by the human species: bacteria/Michelangelo edition

bouba vs. kiki outfits

tell Duolingo to add IPA

On average linguistics familiarity

linguistic phenomenon reducing capitalization

Zipf’s Law

phonetic boundary ambiguity: chris pratt

linguistics takes on the “did it hurt?” meme

Enweirdening words through AI magic

#MetGala2021 as linguistics books

haunted trunk implicature

emoji reaction research idea

Mario epenthesis

Japan’s new prime minister, Britney Spears crash blossom

red flag on unicode support

linguistics Halloween candy

IPA card catalog

memes and emojis are folklore

Canadian English spellcheck

boō, bōare season

Zoom linguistics studies incoming

linguist puzzles

phonetic beatboxing

is this outfit bouba or kiki

warblish

the feminine urge to make your adjectives agree with your nouns

linguists on a bus

General fun

business larping

Wellerman but in emoji

they taste bland when I fall

A thread of emoji poems

multiocular sideeyes emoji

A thread of linguistics-y place names

French accents and icicles on tiktok

Suez meme: ordinary conversation topics vs noticing something about the language

Convaxulations

A double dactyl about the www

A nice festive machine translation fail

The “CDC says” meme takes on linguistic discrimination

A limerick about my podcast

Dendronization

landline emojis

writing gifs by hand on paper

Hangul children’s book

“left to our own devices”

multi-time-zone days of the week

plamps

srùbag

phonetify wrapped: most used phoneme and zipfy unwrapped

glottal on a bottle

xkcd on relevance implicature: debunking

the linguist urge

Finnish pronouns and sarcasm

teach a person how to look up the etymology of “fish” and they learn for a lifetime

the Double Empathy problem

conjugating Christmas

Christmas plural you form

Pinguinuca and Antipinguinuca

verbing tetris

Grice’s maxim of relevance in photo caption directionality: male bison edition

Selected blog posts

I celebrated my ninth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:

Linguistics jobs

metadata specialist and genealogist

legislative drafter

technical writer

CEO of a SaaS company

social media lead (for NASA)

senior analyst

academic linguist

Linguistics fun

Linguistics Games online

“Indeed, old man” in Middle Egyptian

Linguistics Halloween jokes

Beatboxing in IPA

The kiki to bouba pipeline

Dinosaur Comics on the “I dunno” hum

Scuba, an exotic English word meaning “to keep breathing even though the water rises all around you”

Self-referential words for places of articulation

Languages

It’s Complicated/Because Internet on why teens socialize online

The fight to save Hawaii sign language from extinction

The art and science of beatboxing

The linguistics of hyperlinks

Pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description

The origin of language and interspecies communication

A McGill student and professor realized they both speak Mi’kmaq; it changed everything

ancient translation to badger

Pronouncing words in English (by Chinese speakers)

An interactive visual database for American Sign Language

On standard dialects

Meta and advice posts

Superlinguo’s year in review (involving many joint projects with me and also finally getting tenure!)

I reposted a classic “how to twitter” (from a social perspective) post of mine from 2016, which people tell me they still refer to occasionally

How to get started in writing pop linguistics, both short form (media articles) and long form (books)

How we made a better podcast website for Lingthusiasm

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

[thelawgraduate]

ESSAY WRITING 101: HOW TO GET A FIRST/A* IN ANY ESSAY

I’ve been preparing to start my masters after a one-year break from academia, so I’m a little apprehensive about getting into essay writing again. I found a great resource on my University’s website, giving a universal guide to writing a First Class essay. If you’re about to start your first year at uni, want a refresher, or are taking essay-based classes at your high school, this is the post for you!

C O M P R E H E N S I O N

Use a wide range of relevant sources, well understood and fully appreciated.

What do I need to do?

Read beyond the recommended reading given to you or the textbook in class. Can you explain what you’ve read to someone who isn’t studying your course - if not, do you really understand it?   

C R I T I Q U E

Ability to set sources and view points in context and evaluate contributions. Methodological awareness and theoretical appreciation.

What do I need to do?

I posted here about the WHAT-HOW-WHY paragraph structure. The critique is your WHY. WHY is the source written in that way? What was the context of the time or geographical location where it was written? Can either have impacted the writing? What are the limitations to the source - have they avoided discussing something that you believe vital to their argument? Critical thinking is the key to obtaining the highest marks in an essay.

A N A L Y S I S

Excellent answer to the question. Locates suitable concepts and makes a comprehensive assessment of issues involved. Understands the relevant theories and applies them to answering the question.

What do I need to do?

Answer the question. It seems silly but answer the question. What are you actually being asked to talk about, and are there any limiting factors (e.g. a specific time period)? Make sure that everything you’re saying is relevant to the question. If you’re anything like me, going off on a tangent is second nature. A good tip is to read your essay aloud to yourself - if you can sense you’re waffling on about something, then cut it out. 

P R E S E N T A T I O N

Well structured and planned. Clear, articulate style (good spelling, grammar, and syntax.) Proper referencing and bibliography. Confident presentation and appropriate length.

What do I need to do?

Plan plan plan. I never really understood the importance of proper essay planning before I got to University, but it really cannot be emphasised enough. Try and plan in a cyclical sense, taking a thematic approach to your writing and ensuring your main thesis argument is clear throughout your writing. It can be good to break one large essay into 2 or 3 smaller ones, but make sure that they are well connected and don’t read in a disjointed manner. Linking your introduction and conclusion can be an excellent way to ensure that your essay reads fluidly. Another top tip for writing a conclusion is to point your reader to further reading in the area you're writing about - this helps to place your work as part of the academic conversation on the topic.

[sparxwrites]

I've noticed recently that I've become accustomed to capitalising words for Emphasis, both in the absence of italics and in tandem with them. As a language nerd, what does this suggest of language mutation going forward?

this isn’t language mutation! at least, not in the way i suspect you mean it. it’s more of a linguistic adaptation to the inherent limitations of text-based communication - which is a bit of a mouthful, and a lot to unpack, so, let’s start with the basics:

in spoken english, we have words and grammar and sentences, the same as we have with internet english. however, we also have facial expressions, and body language, and hand gestures - and most relevantly here something called prosidy, which internet english is lacking (at least in the traditional sense). prosidy is the changes in pitch and volume of your voice when speaking. this gives rise to stress and intonation in speech, which serves several purposes - one is distinguishing between words (ie. record the object, and record the action), another is conveying emotion, and another is providing emphasis.

the last one is the primary purpose of both italics and initial capitalisation in internet english. since we can’t have prosidy over the internet via pitch and volume, we’ve adopted other methods. 

words with the same spelling are usually disambiguated by context, so they’re not hugely relevant here, but there’s some interesting things going on with emotion and emphasis.

emotion is usually done with memes, emoticons, gifs, or other “verbal tags” - stuff like “/s” for sarcasm or “uwu” (which, interestingly, started off as a genuine expression of “i’m not mad at you!” and is now sarcastic and passive aggressive, so that’s a- lexical? possibly-lexical mutation there), or even acronyms like “tbh” and “lol” and “lmfao” which are now more often used to indicate the mood of a particular statement. for example: when was the last time you saw someone using lmfao to Actually Literally Mean “laughing my ass off”? now consider when the last time you saw someone using lmfao to mean “the previous statement is intended to be mildly humorous in a bleak and self-depreciating kind of way” was. think of the number of posts about “adults need to learn to text!” where people think their parents are angry because they ended a text in a full stop. think of all the wonderful variations on ellipses we have!! the way people use question marks as rhetorical devices, to indicate uncertainty in their statement, or to point out how obvious something is!! i love it. emotion tag-words are my favourite.

emphasis / stress is usually (or at least traditionally) done with italics in written english - it isn’t particularly a internet english thing, it’s been done by writers and comic book artists since well before the internet. this is part of what’s called prosodic stress in spoken english, and it’s used in a couple of different ways. aside from general the most relevant one here is to point out new information in a sentence (called focus in linguistics):

“However, it’s not enough to assume that turtles merely like the taste of pineapples. We must consider the possibility that turtles are deeply, sexually attracted to fruit.”

there’s also contrastive focus (a sub-type of focus, where the person you’re speaking to makes an assumption, and you’re contradicting / correcting them). wikipedia has some nice examples of how it’s often used both online and out loud:

I didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.)I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.)I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took a different one.)I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took something else.)I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took it some other day.)

other things italics can do include indicating sarcasm (“Oh, of course, no one else has ever thought of this, because you’re so clever.”), and highlighting important/argument-relevant (“As I mentioned earlier: fish can feel love. This is just one reason amongst many, however, that fish-human marriage is undeniably ethically sound.”). i’m 90% sure that that latter one is probably also focus-related, but i don’t know enough about information structure generally to commit entirely to calling it focus - tbh, given how many different theories of focus there are, it may be focus under some theories, but not others (see also: that one theory on the wiki page where anything not given is focused, so if you’re specifically bringing up or reminding people of a relevant piece of information it’s probably not given and therefore focused). if the important / argument-relevant use is not focus-related, though, then it’s at least somehow related to information structure; perhaps italics are more generally useable to indicate something about information structure, without it specifically needing to be focus.

stress done with initial capitalisation, however, seems to be a little different - or at least, seems to occur in broader contexts than the one above. i suspect you could do an entire postgrad thesis on the similarities and differences between the two (and i also suspect that i don’t remember enough about syntax and phonology and information structure etc. to offer the best insight possible here), but let’s see if we can’t at least pick the differences apart a bit.

so! initial capitalisation can certainly be used in the same contexts as italics, for focusing new / relevant information and for contrastive focus. this evidenced by: (a) “omg, have u considered that turtles are Sexually Attracted To Fruit??” and “pls remember that Fish Can Feel Love” are both perfectly a-okay in internet english, and (b) by an edited version of the wikipedia examples:

I didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)i Didn't take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.)i didn't Take the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.)i didn't take The test yesterday. (I took a different one.)i didn't take the Test yesterday. (I took something else.)i didn't take the test Yesterday. (I took it some other day.)

(initial capitalisation with “I” is always a little tricky (is it emphasis, or is it just normal capitalisation?), and in my expereince people tend to default to italics with it wherever possible for this reason. i’m also… unsure about how happy i am with the grammaticality (how “okay” a particular sentence is within a given language / dialect) of examples 4 & 5 (“The” and “Test”), but that might be because those two are a little unusual even with italics - “i didn’t take The Test today” looks much better, i think, and can mean both “i took a different one” and “i took something else”.)

however, it’s clear that initial capitalisation can occur in places where italicisation is either outright incorrect, or at least looks kind of weird:

[cute picture of a cat lying on its back, pulling a face, having knocked a plant pot off the table]

commenter A: “Why Do Cats Do These Things”

commenter B: “why do cats do these things”

commenter A’s statement is perfectly correct internet english; commenter B’s statement is just about interpretable, but quite clearly clumsy / not really acceptable in the opinion of most “native internet english speakers”. but why?? well, we’re clearly not focusing “do these things” (because it’s not really providing any information, it’s just sort of… pointing out that the cat in the picture is being weird and then asserting that this is prototypical cat behaviour. it’s trying to tap into a shared knowledge of “what cats do / are like” between “speaker” and reader), and though it’s somewhat humorous it’s not actually sarcastic, so italics are a no-go.

what commenter A is trying to do, however, is to indicate a specific usage / meaning of “do these things” via a specific “tone of voice”. commenter A is not just asking why cats behave specifically in this manner re: knocking pots off and pulling faces, they’re trying to indicate that they consider cats in general to act weirdly and look goofy; typing “why do cats do these things” would be mostly fine if you are indicating frustration / anger with a sudden plague of cats-knocking-off-plant-pots, but that’s not what commenter A is trying to communicate.

additionally, when i say “Why Do Cats Do These Things” out loud, there’s a specific tone of voice i use for it, that i suspect others do to - this kind of flat monotone, with a heavy weight on each word that’s not so much emphasis but a very careful over-pronunciation. it’s not quite emphasis, and definitely not focus-emphasis; it’s almost a comedy thing, or a joke; it’s drawing attention to a specific interpretation of this sentence that’s both humorous and typical within internet spaces; it’s indicating a kind of emotion (exasperation / affection / despair) more than anything.

some other examples of this, where capitalisation is a-okay but italics are somewhere between weird and entirely unacceptable:

“nah it’ll be fine, i’m Basically Immortal lol”

“getting run over would be Suboptimal”

“if word crashes and deletes this essay then, i swear to god, I’m Gonna Die”

“you’re a Terrible Human Being and i love it”

(if anyone can think of any examples where italics and capitalisation is okay, but are in the same style as the above, then let me know! or if people disagree with my analysis of what initial capitalisation sounds like out-loud. this sort of thing relies on native speaker judgements, usually, and although i am as close to a native internet english speaker as you’re gonna get, i’m only one person. other people may have other judgements.)

i suspect, from all of this, that the function of initial capitalisation is to indicate any kind of change in prosidy in the speaker’s voice (though primarily weird monotone), usually with an emphasis on a specific interpretation of the particular phrase that’s initially-capitalised. this is why it can be used for focus, and for sarcasm, and for more general emphasis the same way - but why it can also be used to represent a monotone (“I Would Prefer Not To”) in a way italics can’t, or to indicate that specific “you know what i’m talking about / i am referring to a concept we both share but that cannot be put into words” tone (“Why Are You Like This”), or that looping-up-and-down voice people use when they’re winding someone up (“I Am A Joy And A Delight, idk what you’re talking about :3ccc”).

italics can kind of be used for some of these, but only really as an extension of its function as an indicator of sarcasm - which means that italics are intelligible in that context, but just look weird, and like the person using them isn’t very fluent in internet english. that’s because initial caps don’t quite indicate sarcasm, though it occupies a similar teasing-dramatic tonal area; in some / most instances, initial caps seems to function similar to adding “lmfao” or “lol” onto the end, which suggests it’s also indicating a self-depreciating or bleak humour / drama to the sentence. initial caps seem to function, then, as a focus / emphasis device, but also as an emotion indicator, which is a sort of fascinating crossover of function - but very similarly to the way we see voice and prosidy being used for both focus / emphasis, and for conveying emotion.

so, you probably use italics + capitalisation in conjunction because you’re trying to convey two different things. for a sentence like “drinking three cups of coffee in a row is a terrible, awful, no good idea and oh my god Why Would You Do That”, the italics are conveying where you’re putting stress / emphasis in the sentence (on “oh my god why would you do that”). the initial capitalisation, however, is indicating that on top of emphasis, you’re saying “why would you do that” in a specifically unusual kind of prosidy, probably quite a flat and monotone one, and that it’s designed to be teasing / humorous.

i also suspect that italics + capitalisation can be used as a kind of “double emphasis”, or marking out an emphasised section within an already emphasised talking point. kind of the way bolding sometimes works?? (except the internet tends not to use bolding fsr, or only uses it for headings / as a way to highlight the most important sentences in a wall of information. it’s a structural-level organisational device, essentially.) so you can re-parse “it’s so important we feed cats and dogs different food, because cats are not dogs and have different dietary requirements!!!” as “[...], precisely because Cats Are Not Dogs and have different dietary requirements!!!”. in this instance, you’re emphasising that the reason for different treatment is that cats are not dogs and therefore have different dietary requirements, but also emphasising the fact in and of itself that cats are not dogs.

i also also suspect that, when we just need one form of emphasis and are choosing whether to use italics or initial capitalisation, we consider the context of our writing. in this “essay”, i’ve mostly used italics - they’re a little more “formal” as far as internet language goes (so, not very formal at all, but still more standard than initial caps), they’re more semantically accessible (i.e. if non-tumblr people find this essay, whereas they might be able to proactively work out what initial caps are intended to convey from context, they’ll probably intuitively understand the use of italics here), and they’re more visually accessible / they disrupt the visual flow of the text less. when i’m talking with friends (especially on platforms like skype and discord and tumblr messenger which, if they support italics at all, do so in a “non-intuitive” way, i.e. not using ctrl+i like word processing software does), in shorter / less formal settings, where the visual flow of the sentence is part of the meaning / emotion of the sentence in and of itself (how long are the sentences? do you use full stops? do you capitalise the beginnings of sentences? do you send each sentence as a new message? on a new line? how many dots do you use for ellipses? keysmashes? ?!??!??!?!?!?!!!! ?), i tend to use initial caps.

so tl;dr: italics seem to be primarily used to indicate focus - you’re pointing out a new or specifically relevant piece of information, or you’re correcting / denying a piece of information that your conversational partner has provided (or perhaps being sarcastic). initial capitalisation can Also/also be used for this purpose, but is additionally used to represent Any/any kind of change in prosidy that would occur if you spoke the sentence aloud (since we also mess about with intonation for other reasons beside focus). ...i sincerely hope someone has done / is doing / will do a thesis on this bc honestly this probably has some fascinating implications for information structure or prosidy or Something/something tbh.

regarding the “mutations” comment: these sorts of internet english quirks are not language mutations, per se, because we already have features for distinguishing this kind of thing in spoken english - and also because a lot of this stuff is what we call paralinguistic phenomena, which means that sarcasm and emphasis etc. communicate something, but it’s not actually strictly part of the language itself. it just adds an extra layer of meaning on top of the stuff being conveyed by the actual words.

instead, they’re adaptations of our orthographic (writing) system to cope with the increasing demands of written/internet english to convey these sorts of things. online, we don’t have people’s prosidy and their body language / expressions to read, so we need altered orthography or other visual indicators to ensure that people correctly understand the intent and mood behind your communication, not just the raw word-content of it. that’s why internet english has developed these quirks. essentially: our communication has always had these paralinguistic phenomena, these ways to convey emotion and emphasis; we’re just finding different ways of expressing them in response to environmental restrictions, i.e. the fact we’re all increasingly communicating via text on a regular, intensive basis. historically, we’ve primarily communicated verbally, so it’s not developed due to lack of need - but the internet has has created a heavily-used, text-primary environment, so now we do need it, and we’re collaboratively creating it as a result because humans (especially young humans) are excellent language innovators. it’s pretty neat!!

(as an interesting aside, i suspect that there’s also an element of in-grouping going on here. people want to mark out the community belong to, the people they’ve chosen as their “tribe” - irl, we do this via slang, and accents, and sometimes through certain types of wordplay or forms of prosidy / gesture etc. obviously, online, we can have slang (think about how often you’ve seen someone on tumblr say “top kek”, versus how ubiquitous that phrase is on reddit), but accents are a little harder. so we instead develop different ways of typing, different ways we use italics or capitalisation or emotes. some of this depends on platform constraints - if your community’s site doesn’t allow bold/italics, or automatically converts emotes into weird yellow smileys, you’re gonna have to develop workarounds for that - but some of it is us going “these are my people, and i can tell because we talk differently, and we’re Not Like You People”. this is why it can sometimes be linguistically disorienting going onto a different platform; i often find posters’ “tone” on reddit hard to read, because they seem to signal emotion differently to on tumblr!!

this may, perhaps, also be a reason why we’ve ended up with both capitalisation and italics - if one social group developed italics as emphasis, and a second social group (perhaps on a platform without capacity for italics) developed capitalisation as emphasis, and then the two groups merged or interacted, you’re gonna get this linguistic transference where the groups adopt one another’s styles without dropping their own original style. and then- voila! both italics and capitalisation for emphasis. but because language often tends towards getting rid of redundancy, the two styles specified out into having slightly different connotations / occuring in slightly different pragmatic environments. or, perhaps, the capitalisation style was always broader than italics, and there’s not been any change yet to reduce redundancy, but there will be in the future. who knows!)

(as a second interesting aside, all of this is probably partly why autistic people often report online friendships being easier / report preferring textual communication to face-to-face. whereas expressions and prosidy can be exceptionally difficult to learn to read if they’re not instinctual - think of the infinite variations of muscle contraction and relaxation in the face! the number of different pitches and volumes and patterns we can make with our voice! they’re very difficult to categorise because they overlap a lot and tend to gradient into one another - these kinds of “emotional tags” are usually quite easy and clear-cut. “/s” indicates sarcasm every time it is used, entirely unambiguously. stuff like “lol” or “tbh” are a little more ambiguous, but even then, they have a more limited set of emotional contexts that they’re used in than, say, the corners of your lips moving upwards. gifs and memes are even better; if they don’t outright say what they mean on the gif or in the meme, there’s entire websites dedicated to cataloguing and explaining memes should you be unclear of the usage.

additionally, internet environments can be a little more forgiving wrt people not picking up on tone, or using an incorrect / weird tone, when conversing; it’s hard to display tone online, and even allistic people (especially internet newbies or older people) struggle with it, so tonal faux pas or misunderstandings are a little more expected (and therefore forgiven) than irl.)

[shepherds-of-haven]

shIT WAIT how would all the characters text in a modern au? (i.e. grammatically perfect, no capitalizon, weird internet syntax, uses emojis like Egyptian hieroglyphs, etc) Please note: If Mimir doesn't text like Carrie Fisher used to tweet then I will cry.

MIMIR WOULD TEXT LIKE JADEN SMITH, 2013, HOW-ARE-MIRRORS-REAL-IF-OUR-EYES-AREN’T-REAL ERA. (I’m sorry if that makes you cry!)

MC: hey Mim, do you know the best place to get a sandwich around here?

Mimir: if there is bread winners, there is bread losers. but you can’t toast what isn’t real. 

MC: …

Blade would text very succinctly and business-like, often in one-word answers, perfect spelling but usually no capitalization (unless autocorrect was on his phone). Occasionally he would use an emoji if he was in a good mood, but he’d often use it wrong. (Like he would think 👀 is a startled stare or something.)

MC: hey, do you want to get lunch together?

Blade: yes.

MC: where do you want to eat?

Blade: the clover crown. I’m off at 12. 

MC: okay! see you then!

Blade: 🦈

Trouble would text with MASSIVE typos and weird abbreviations so that it would be almost indecipherable. He would also throw in random netspeak and slang.

MC: hey, I have a question

Trouble: u wot m8

MC: is it better to use a rifle or a handgun when dealing with imps?

Trouble: itd dpend on were ur aiming like the

MC: …just tell me in person

Tallys would text normally (good spelling and punctuation, no use of slang) but would take a really long fucking time to reply to you. Like she’d leave people on read constantly.

MC: Tallys I need help 

MC: Tallys 

MC: Shery just asked me what saltwort is for what do I do

MC: Tallys

MC: !!

MC: Hello?

[Two hours later]

Tallys: Sorry MC I saw this but forgot to reply. What did you need?

Shery would also text fairly normally (good spelling and whatnot, but fairly casual) but she’d be enamored with using the stickers that are popular on LINE and Kakao and not regular emojis. The ones that look like this:

Chase would text basically like a teenager/typical millennial with slang, abbreviations, and, yes, some hieroglyph-like emojis!

MC: hey, how are you feeling?

Chase: lol never better

MC: …what does that mean?

Chase: idk lmao

MC: aren’t you sick with the flu?

Chase: 🤷🤔

MC: …what’s going on?

Chase: maaaybe i got into some of tallys meds

MC: oh god

Chase: and maaaaybe some of them are not for the flu lmfao

MC: hallucinogenics or aphrodisiacs?

Chase: come over and find out? 😜

Chase: 🍆 

Chase: lol

MC: oh my god

Chase: tbh its a little of column a, a little of column b

Riel would text like one of those awful people who use extremely formal language, impeccable grammar and spelling, and only periods. The ones who always sound really cold and sort of mad at you all of the time. Basically like how Dwight Schrute would text.

Riel: It’s Shery’s birthday tomorrow. 

MC: Yes, and…?

Riel: I’m reminding you. 

MC: oh, okay. It’s in the courtyard, right?

Riel: Yes.

MC: Do we have the cake and streamers?

Riel: Halek made the cake. I need to buy the streamers.

MC: okay!

Riel: Unless you want to.

MC: do you need me to?

Riel: No. That was a joke. 

MC: okay… 

Riel: Good night. 

Halek would text fairly normally for a 20-something in terms of spelling and grammar, but would be pretty laconic in his responses, meaning he wouldn’t be very good with conversation over text.

MC: hey, how did your day go?

Halek: It went well. What about yours?

MC: It was pretty good! I killed 3 demons on patrol and didn’t get a scratch!

Halek: yay :)

MC: yay! 

Red would be a good texter in theory: attentive, funny, casual. But he’d be one of those texters who text in big fat blocks (used to be multi-page texts on Android) that could quickly become overwhelming and taxing to reply to.

Red: hey! I just saw this dog outside the compound and thought of you. I think Caine wants to tame it but it can smell the desperation, lol. How’s Ambryn? The last time I was there the streets were kind of on fire so I didn’t get to see it much. Also I thought this was kind of funny: [link to some relevant meme]

MC: [is too busy to reply to him] 

Ayla would text like an early 2000s T9 teenager:

MC: hey what are you doing right now?

Ayla: pwning some of the n00bz n the cortyard

MC: you’re wailing on the Shepherd recruits?

Ayla: ye roflmao

Lavinet would text like a basic bitch:

Lavinet: ugh my hair is a mess this morning 🤦‍♀️

MC: yeah that’ll happen when you get demon blood in it

Lavinet: i washed it tho!

Lavinet: admit tho that i rock that look

Lavinet: #aesthetic #hardcore #ombre

MC: Lavinet

Lavinet: #bringitbitch

Lavinet: ugh sorry we’re out of wine i need to dash for more byyyyeeee!! 💖💕💋

[tanadrin]

Reordberend

(Part 8 of ?; start; previous; next)

It was two or three days before Katherine felt strong enough to stand. A few people seemed to come and go from the hall as she drifted in and out of sleep, and she would occasionally open her eyes to find others sitting around the fire at the far end of the room. Every time it seemed to be a different set of faces. The faces seemed mostly uninterested in her, though; they did not approach or try to speak to her. There were no windows in the high stone walls, and she had no idea whether it was early or late each time she woke. Whoever had prepared her bed had taken her coat, gloves, and boots, and bandaged her hands and feet. Both still hurt, probably from frostbite. In theory her cybernetics could fix that pretty easily, but there was still no response when she pressed the standby switch. At some point, she woke to find the hall empty. There was one of those densely embroidered overcoats the others wore, draped over the end of the bed, but no boots. Presumably, she wasn’t meant to go wandering about outside.

So she decided to have a look around. She shuffled slowly around the hall. It was twenty meters long, maybe, its metal roof supported occasionally by stone pillars made out of the same rough blocks as the walls. There were side rooms at odd intervals along both walls, their doorways protected from drafts by heavy draped cloth. It was the same material as the coats and the tapestries, some kind of soft, dense synthetic fiber. Some of the rooms looked like they were for sleeping, with beds slightly less improvisational than the one Katherine had slept in. One was a pantry, stocked with dried meats. The last one, to her surprise, contained books. Hundreds of them. They looked immense, and the shelves that lined all four walls were full.

Katherine had seen only a few print books in her life, outside the archives of Trinity College. They had all been small, slim volumes with paper covers, the kind of thing you could slip into a large pocket. These books were enormous. There was a stand in the middle of the room, next to a heavy table, about right to read at if you stood. So presumably they weren’t just for show. She selected a few volumes at random, then carefully slid them off their shelves. She piled them on the table, then opened one on the stand.

She didn’t know the language of the Dry Valleys People, and their script made matters even more difficult. It was a Latin script of some kind, she supposed. The letters were approximately familiar. She could pick out the difference between Russian and Arabic and Chinese and the like on the signs in Port Alexander, and these didn’t look anything like that. But the forms were strange, with curls here and long stems there that made it hard to work out what was supposed to be what. There were two different kinds of r, for one. And accent marks she didn’t understand. But what was stranger than that was the books themselves. They weren’t printed books at all. They were all clearly handwritten, every letter and every word just a little bit different, painstakingly copied out on pages made of animal skin, bound in wooden covers. Mostly the text was dense, without any kind of obvious punctuation, and few line breaks, but occasionally she would turn a page and find spread out across a whole page, or sometimes two facing pages, ornate illustrations of people and animals and abstract forms, stained with dark mineral colors. They were like the tapestries in the hall: here and there was an obvious figure, or something that suggested the head or haunch of a beast, but they were surrounded by sinuous shapes, flourishes that looked like detached pieces of architecture, united together with a strange sense of perspective and a compositional logic she couldn’t follow.

She could make neither heads nor tails of the first two books. One was filled with illustrations of plants and animals and shapes that might have been landforms, or icebergs. The last twenty pages, maybe, were nothing but diagrams of the stars. She noted with interest that the Milky Way and the two Magellanic Clouds were all annotated with the same word. Clearly the Dry Valleys People weren’t entirely ignorant of astronomy. And where the first book looked to have been written all by the same hand, the second seemed to have been compiled by dozens of authors; the shapes of the letters seemed to change every few pages.

The third book surprised her. Its cover was more ornate than the others. It wasn’t just plain wood that had been painted; it was a frame in which carefully carved pieces of ivory had been set, depicting four great winged creatures. What looked like a lion, maybe, and some sort of bird, and a person, and some kind of cow, maybe. She wasn’t sure anybody around here had ever seen a cow or a lion in their lives, but it was a good attempt. She opened the book, and a thrill of surprise ran through her. The text was in two closely-written columns, divided by large initial capitals; but each section was further broken up with little numerals just above the line. It looked for all the world like a Bible.

Part of one, anyway. And in no language she recognized. Katherine hadn’t read much Scripture as a kid, and none at all as an adult. Her mother liked to read her stories out of the Bible before bed sometimes, but they were paraphrases as often as not, and what Katherine could remember of the Bible was mostly a lot of conjunctions, and really awkward syntax. But there were four verses she did know by heart. The book she had in front of her was in four parts; just the gospels, if she had to guess. She went to the beginning of the first one, then counted down six chapters, and from the beginning, nine verses. She began to sound them out to herself as best she could. 

“Fader ure, du? Du de eyart on heyofon… heyofonu, si din nama gehalgod…” She was sure she was getting some of the sounds wrong. There was this d with a stroke through the top, and a little line over the u at the end of heofonu. But even if she was butchering it, she knew what she was saying. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And the words in front of her weren’t so different from that.

“To becume din rikke…”

“Rice,” someone said behind her. Two syllables, sharp and clear. Reach a. Katherine turned around. It was the woman who had shown her the map. She was leaning against the door, staring at Katherine with sharp, dark eyes that made her feel intensely self-conscious. Her face was framed by the hood of her cloak, on which scraps of frost still clung. She looked… puzzled? Amused?

She pointed at the book. “Rice,” she said again. “To becume ðin rice.“ Toe bekoom a theen reach a.

She straightened up and walked over to Katherine. She pointed at the beginning of the prayer.

“Canst ðu hit?” she asked.

“I’m--I’m sorry? I don’t understand,” Katherine said.

The woman took Katherine’s hand, and put her finger under the first word. Then she pointed at Katherine. “Sprec hit. Fram onginnung.”

Katherine looked down at the text, and tried sounding out the words again.

“Fader ure… du de--” 

“Ne.” The woman put a hand over Katherine’s lips, then pointed at her again. “Ne ræd. Ðu. Ðine geðeode.”

“My what? You want me to say it in my language?”

If the woman understood, she didn’t show it. She just stared at Katherine.

“Our father? Who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name.” She started nodding as Katherine recited the words. When Katherine finished, she walked out of the room. Katherine stood there for a minute, feeling rather silly, wondering if she’d done something wrong.

When the woman returned, she held up her hand. She was holding Katherine’s cross necklace. She’d been wearing when she went overboard. She thought she’d lost it in the sea.

“Ðu eart Cristne?” the woman asked.

“Christian? Are you asking if I’m a Christian?”

The woman nodded. Katherine shook her head. “No. Not Christian.”

“Ne? Soðlice?” She held out the necklace and dropped it into Katherine’s hand.

“Ðu fricgest, ond ðu birst seo rod. Ac ðu eart ne Cristne?” She seemed to shrug.

She beckoned for Katherine to follow her, and they went back out into the main hall. There was a pair of heavy leather boots beside Katherine’s bed. The woman pointed to them and the coat, and Katherine put them on. She pointed to the fur-lined hood on the back, reminding Katherine to pull it up. Then she led her to the end of the hall, on the opposite side of the fire pit; there was a large doorway draped with layers of cloth and skins, which they pushed through. The woman fumbled with the heavy latch of a door, and they stepped out into dim half-light.

Katherine couldn’t be sure if it was very late at night, or very early in the morning. The sun was low against the ragged ridges that rose on either side of a long, low valley. Dark gray-brown slopes curved gently downward, to a floor littered with stones and debris. A sharp, bitter wind seemed to blow continuously, which Katherine’s coat only partly protected her against.

The hall was a large, long stone building that stood on one side of a little village square. Smaller houses stood around the square on the other sides, their doors facing toward the middle, all made of stone and roofed with metal, all windowless against the freezing wind. Katherine could see smaller outbuildings beyond, and paths leading down the valley, and up into the hills on either side. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen people in a settlement this size; she wondered how many villages like this there were in the Dry Valleys. She had imagined something rather cruder, to be entirely honest; the reports she had read had talked about makeshift shelters, barely adequate against the extremes of Antarctic weather.

Her companion led her across the square, to one of the small houses directly facing the hall. She opened the door, and they pushed their way through another heavy curtain, and Katherine found herself suddenly standing the middle of a small crowd of people.

There was a firepit against one wall of the house, with some small benches beside it, on which a few elderly-looking men and women sat. Their hair was gray to white, and the men all had thick, long beards. There were others sitting, on chairs, or on the floor, which was hard-packed sand and grit, covered with rugs, and maybe a half-dozen more leaning against the walls. The house had only one room, with a high ceiling, and as Katherine glanced up, she could even see, peering down from a wooden loft on one wall, more small faces. It appeared she was an object of some curiosity among the Dry Valleys People.

She felt a hand at her back. Her companion was pushing her forward, to the middle of the room. Every eye in the house suddenly seemed to be on her at once, and she looked around from face to face nervously. Some were old, some were young. All had an intensity of expression she had never seen before. It was like she’d shown up to a party conspicuously underdressed, times a million. Or she was surrounded by everyone she’d ever offended in her entire life. Come to think of it, she probably had offended them, just by being here. There was a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach.

One of the old women sitting near the fire looked at Katherine and said something.

“Come again?” Katherine said lamely.

“Nama. Ðin nama,” her companion said in her ear.

“Nama?” What? “Oh, my name.” She pointed to herself. “Katherine Alice Green,” she said slowly.

There was a little muttering, and the people by the fire seemed to be conversing among themselves. Finally, the old woman who had asked her name stood and took a couple steps toward Katherine. She had something in her hand, and Katherine realized it was Christopher’s letter of introduction. She said something else, rapid-fire, and looked at Katherine expecting an answer.

“I really don’t understand,” Katherine said. “I don’t speak your language. No module.” She pointed to her head. “No modules at all. My cybernetics are dead.”

This didn’t seem to help. The woman seemed to be getting annoyed with Katherine. She looked at her companion, and said something in an acid tone of voice, to which Katherine’s companion responded with a sharp, almost sarcastic-sounding retort. There was general muttering.

Things only seemed to get worse from there. Katherine’s companion and the old woman argued for a bit; then the people by the fire argued, loudly, among themselves. After a little while, some people from the sides of the room chimed in, and just when it seemed tempers were running a little too high, one of the men by the fire, who hadn’t spoken yet, stood slowly, said a single loud word, and everyone fell silent. He pointed at Katherine, and Katherine’s companion, and said something slowly, like he was intoning some ritual, then sat back down. This seemed to end the discussion. People began filing out of the house, the faces in the loft withdrew, and someone put a pot of something on the fire to cook. Katherine’s companion tugged on her sleeve, and led her out.

They went back to the hall. Katherine’s bed in the main room had been cleared away; instead, her companion led her to one of the side rooms, and pointed to a bed.

“Thanks,” Katherine said. She was suddenly very, very tired again; even mild exertion seemed to be draining for her. “What was that all about?”

Her companion left the room, then came back a few moments later carrying the book of Gospels. She handed it to Katherine.

“Ræd, ond leorn. Ðu sceal ure geðeode leornan, ond arolice.”

Katherine sank down onto the bed. It was exhausting, not understanding anything anyone said to you. To try to patch together meaning from the one word in ten that sounded vaguely familiar. Stupid as it was, she wanted to grab the woman and yell at her to just say something she could understand.

“I don’t understand,” she said angrily. “I don’t fucking understand.”

The woman seemed to understand her frustration, anyway. She squatted down next to the bed, and put her hand on Katherine’s knee. She closed her eyes, and seem to think very hard for a moment.

“Learn. Our tongue. Learn. From book. Swiftly.”

“Why?” asked Katherine. “What happens if I don’t?”

“Out.” The woman gestured, in the vague direction of the hills. “You, out.”

Katherine felt her stomach sinking. “If I go out there alone, I will die. Die? Like, to death. You know that, right?”

The woman nodded.

“And if I learn your tongue, I can stay?” Katherine asked.

The woman shrugged.

“They deem. Learn not, go out. You learn, they choose fate. Go or stay. I know not.”

So that was that. She would have to learn their language, and maybe, just maybe, they would let her stay if she did. Otherwise, they would send her out of the valleys, into the Antarctic wastes, where she would die. Alone.

Just fucking great job, Katherine, she thought to herself.

[obiternihili]

3 trains of thought i’ve been riding

how can I know anything about anything I haven’t done myself? Can I know anything about the physical universe without doing physics, or am I just trusting a narrative pushed by physicists who have a genuine understanding and no real way to communicate it, but the narrative at least stops me from getting in the way? guest starring the simulation hypothesis

1.

So first off, given materialism, there’s a map/territory thing. You knowledge isn’t the thing itself, ever, it’s a symbolic representation of it, whether it’s made of pure logic or like the cognitive representation in your mind or whatever.

My thinking is natural language is made out of our comparatively weak short term memory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsXP8qeFF6A

It’s parsimonious. Memory has a syntax; it can be recalled in arbitrary order but has an internal order. Muscle memory is memory in the brain actually that just controls motor control; phonology is muscle memory.

From walking into semiotics accidentally I’ve come away convinced that ‘invariant’ words, like ‘dog’, ‘cat’, are patterns, and most of what language is is assigning invariant patterns to ‘indexicals’ or words who’s meaning is determined in the way a pronoun’s meaning is assigned to it. This explains why even invariant words change meaning over time; their internal patterns are pruned for redundancy etc. This is also why memories change over time to fit a narrative of the memory as we recall them; memories aren’t recordings, they’re patterns linked syntactically.

Language is fundamentally translatable even if there isn’t a one word to one word equivalence, which is why we can express the same event in every language, even if we might have to do some explaining to get around things there aren’t common shorthands for. There’s a problem of how well we represent the patterns in one language to another, but that’s a problem of how well we do something, not if it’s possible. This also extends to medium; language is medium independent. Which is why we can represent language in written words, spoken words, or signs.

So it’s entirely right that ideas formed in non-linguistic means can be translated into language that can be parsed and bring the same cognitive representation from one person to another. You can still make mistakes in pattern matching, but that doesn’t mean your pattern matching skills are even bad. With enough theory building (which is to say, hearing things, asking questions, cross referencing it against the rest of your knowledge, etc) you can in fact understand what is meant by “wave particle duality” or whatever without personally conducting experiments, if you interlink it into enough other theories, etc. Or you can know that something is hot without touching it.

you can know things

2.

weird universe thoughts: Let’s assume wave function collapse is real

then the universe is lazy

if the universe is lazy, then the universe isn’t a wave function, it’s a wave procedure

if the universe is a procedure then it can be represented as a context free grammar

natural language is a special case of a context free grammar if you believe noam chomsky

if we include in our definition of language non-natural languages like conlangs, including philosophical conlangs, then we can include all CFGs as languages

therefore the universe is a language

in fact if the total number of expressions representated in the language is closed it can be represented as a finite state machine, or equivalently as a regular expression, implying the universe has a regular language (using a different definition of language than lang = CFG above) too. there are at least 3 languages of the universe; the universe, the reglang of the u, and english

3.

feel like i’ve stumbled into woo. but before “the universe is a simulation in a lazy program” is taken seriously, remember the translation principle. All of those are translations of an underlying logical form. It might just be that that “the universe can be represented as a lazy program” is as trivially true as anything else is because at some level every logical structure can be represented that way.

Doesn’t imply that it is that, just that it could be that, but also equivalently a language or a finite state machine or a wave function or physical world if those can be translated into each other.

if anything I think it kind of emboldens the “even if we’re part of a simulation, this is the totality of what’s real for us. for all intents and purposes within our scope living in either indistinguishable and we shouldn’t act as if living in a simulation really means anything different from living in a reality” because it implies that simulations and realities might be the same thing at an underlying level.

The particulars might be different - I don’t think this means we should be concerned for fictional characters because I don’t think our mental representations necessarily capture the scope of consequences and suffering we’re morally concerned with. At the same time it’s weird that if they’re simulated the patterns are translated and communicated and exist in the world outside their creators and take on survival of the fittest properties and morph into memes and ideologies and shit; being concerned about but not for fictions. It’s also weird that they escape into a higher order universe and we don’t seem to if we’re second order? This might be worth considering like, understanding the universe ~reality as the sum total of reachable states (not perse currently reachable for things outside our event horizon) from a given state, in which case our ideas share our reality and it’s just not worth dying for an idea in a romantic way (don’t kill yourself for art dipshit) unless it leads to better outcomes for non-ideas like people 

there’s also a fascinating thing in that i’m not sure that ideas, despite being subject to survival of the fittest, can really be said to suffer on their own? They don’t really seem to suffer except in so far that the host they parasitize suffers on their behalf. Or maybe they do suffer but they have to make us suffer in order to be actionable such that their host corrects the behavior to improve the parasite’s fitness? But like, animals and plants can be said to suffer more (evidence wise) than they do, I’m not so sure it can be proven that ideas respond to stimulation on their own, or if only their media do. So if it’s acceptable to kill plants to further our feeding, fleeing, fighting, or mating, it’s probably moreso to consume and metabolize fictions for it. 

[disconcision]

where could i find enough info on what u mean by "racket structures" to understand what ur doing with fructure? (for ref: let's say i know what an s-expression is, but i've never actually used them)

haha well to understand what i’m doing with fructure would necessitate that i understood what i’m doing with fructure but i can try to get you a little closer to my current state of confusion.  and, apologies in advance, but i’m going to take advantage of this ask to clarify some things for myself out loud.

(i should clarify that i am relatively new to programming languages, having pivoted in their direction last year just prior to completing a math undergraduate degree. you might know more about actual programming than i do so let me know where i’m being patronizing.)

so i take it then that you’ve never used a lisp e.g. clojure, scheme, emacs lisp, etc? ‘racket’ is the language formerly known as ‘PLT scheme’ where ‘PLT’ stands for programming languages theory. it’s a language specifically designed as a laboratory for language features, a ‘programming language’ programming languages where programming languages are first-class objects, at least in principle.

fructure, which is my first substantial self-directed programming project, is a racket-based structure editor, initially operating on code written in racket, but with an eye toward leveraging racket’s language-level features to make it end-user extensible to a broader range of languages. in brief, a structure editor is an editor/IDE which operates directly on the AST instead of the text source code. the advantage of doing this in s-expr-based languages is that you practically have an AST already; parsing is very simple.

more generally, i am using the idea of s-exprs, and more generally, annotated s-expressions as an ‘interface’ for interacting with syntax. like if i want to interact with a particular language, i want to be able to declaratively specify the grammar for that language, and feed it into a parser generator to get a parser for that language into an s-expr form. there are already good tools for this. what i want to do then is to design a standardized s-expr-based template by which i can declaratively annotate particular elements of that grammar. these annotations would include parameter names, types, default values, and visual styles for all the constituent forms of that language.

for example, in my grammar i might specify the form (if expr expr expr) as a subcase of the sort ‘expr’. then i would specify the following annotation layers:

type: (if bool any any)

names: (if condition consequence alternative)

defaults: (if true void void)

style: (if-wrapper (if-head) (hole) (hole) (hole))

where in the style layer, the names are references to a css-ish stylesheet which specifies how different parts of the ‘if’ form are colored and laid out on the screen. eventually (distant future) i’d like to be able to specify a near-arbitrary layout algorithm for each different form in the language’s grammar; essentially, each embedded component of the source code would be a special-purpose editor for precisely the kind of function/data which that part of the source represents. the ‘editor’ would no longer be a monolithic application but a hierarchically nested tower of special-purpose editors.

my emphasis now though is on applying such annotated representations to allow the user to interact with source code in a richer, more structured way. basically, i want to turn refactoring into a first-class concept, in that IDE-based refactoring should not be a matter of what notions of refactoring are build into the IDE at compile-time, but rather can be created by end-users on-the-fly according to their specific workflows. in fact, i hope to get to the point where refactoring is not merely something you’re doing to a particular object-level piece of code, but a more general approach of understanding and thereby restructuring one’s own processes of interacting with all kinds of structured information. 

to this end, i’m applying racket’s extensive pattern-matching functionality, which i am attempting to both extend and syntactically streamline to the point where it can be applied, in-line, to rapidly destructure and restructure source code in controlled, semantically-aware ways.

like it’s hard to get into specific examples here without building up some vocabulary; i’m hoping later to illustrate it with some gifs. but for a pretty trivial example let’s say i’ve selected an ‘if’ statement. in fructure, selections aren’t a binary matter of you’re pointing at something or you’re not; selections have structure. for example, one of the primary modes of selection is pattern painting. by default, whatever you’ve selected is painted with the ANY pattern. that means that there’s a meta-environment variable, ANY, whose value is the subtree which is currently selected. so if i press the replace key, and tab-complete to replace the selected ‘if’ with a new form, say another ‘if’ statement, i can then use ANY as a variable for any of the sub-expressions of that new statement. when i press ENTER to effectuate the replacement, that ANY would be replaced by it’s value, effectively nesting the old ‘if’ in the newer one.

this is nothing fancy, of course; most editors have some built-in way of wrapping an existing statement in a new one. my approach though is at least slightly more general. instead of using the default ANY pattern, i can elect to paint a new pattern onto the current ‘if’, or press a button to toggle between suggested patterns. for example, one such pattern might be (if A B C), which captures the various sub-expressions of the ‘if’ as variables A, B, and C.  so if i wanted to turn that simple ‘if’ into some fancier multi-conditional construct like a ‘cond’, i would just start typing ‘cond’, tab-complete, type in [A B] for the first condition/consequence pair, and then [else C] for the second.

again, switching between different conditional constructs is a extant feature in many editors, but the point here is that there’s a generic interface for these kinds of destructurings to be done on the fly. the pattern-based DSL i want to implement goes further than this, and allows the specification of contextually-aware patterns. the utility here is the ability to create pattern which are aware of the scope of their variables, so that source code can be transformed in ways that guarantee the preservation of certain syntactic and semantic invariants. 

my big goal right now is creating an intuitive interface for declaratively specify context-aware rewriting rules and chaining them together compositionally to create an extensible, somewhat language-independent schema for restructuring and refactoring.

i’m going to cut this ramble off because i feel at this point this thread is likely useless without pics, and it’s going to be a bit before i can provide in-situ illustrations. not sure that actually addresses your question. if you’re just wondering about racket the language i’m happy to talk about it in-and-of-itself.

[irarelypostanything]

Healthy Competition

One thing that I feel software engineers lack in their field is healthy competition.  In other fields, like being a lawyer or a business owner or even something like a stock broker, competition is baked in.  But if you’re a software engineer and want to compete with someone, then it would have to be apples to apples: It would have to be someone who works on the same kind of thing, under the same leadership.

And if you try to compete like that, you’re probably an ass.  “Hey, where do I find that file we’re supposed to run?” “Not telling.  You’re my competition.”

Now, you can compete to see who gets promoted first.  That’s much too slow.  You can compete in something like a hackathon, where what app is the best is subjective but how many votes an app gets is objective.  We (our company) don’t do that.  I think that healthy competition is a natural and necessary thing, but “healthy” is a key word.  The problem with competing by just stating how well you do is that you may inadvertently compete with people who have no desire to compete.  Remember college?  Remember that one kid who would always get 100 and ask someone who got like 40 (usually me) how they did?

Them: Hey Evan, how did you do on the midterm?   Me: fk u

*****

I’m not into sports, unless you consider running a sport, but they’re probably the best example of healthy competition.  Literally...sports make you healthy.  Also, you adapt your behavior based on the actions of your opponents.  Also, you get feedback pretty quickly for who did the best, and you help each other to get better.  

We love board games, and some of us love video games, because of how they appeal to that strong desire for healthy competition.  Puzzles are a completely different aspect.  If you were to teach someone chess, you could gauge whether this person is into competition or into puzzles by seeing if they prefer playing chess, or solving chess puzzles and analyzing famous games.  There really are people who love chess, but prefer learning chess theory and doing puzzles involving chess to playing the game.  Personally, that baffles me.  There are many people who love puzzles, but I am not one of them.

Regardless, coding is much more like a puzzle.  I think the reason a lot of people are fascinated by cybersecurity is that they love the aspect of opposing sides, one exploiting vulnerabilities and one attempting to patch them.  Then you do an internship in cybersecurity, and realize that instead of doing just that you’re also going to spend a lot of time on the phone, telling a lot of software engineers throughout the country that their code is non-compliant.

Sorry Christina.

Software engineering is much more like a puzzle.  You fit pieces together, and like in a puzzle there’s nothing actively competing with you to intentionally make your life harder.  The compiler tells you how you’re doing.  The syntax highlighting helps you out.  But like in a puzzle, you have to fit everything together and make sure it works properly.  You’re the one who has to fail, constantly, and each failure that the compiler or debugger tells you about will bring you closer to success.  Like in a puzzle, you compete with the project itself.  

But in conclusion to this 15-minute free write I think that we, as software engineers, should still find ways to channel this competitive energy.  Puzzles can be a great thing, and in fact some people prefer them.  But we have in us a strong desire to beat rivals, to make each other grow through competition, and so we should at least turn to hobbies like Chess or sports or even code competitions (that make coding a more competitive action) that let us engage in our natural competitiveness.    

[ojamesy]

“Art and Life, Nature and Culture, Ulysses” by CHERYL HERR

Visiting Ireland, the same reader may become convinced that the narrative must be understood in context; it is a book about a writer's vexed relationship to a land plagued with poverty, dominated by an oppressive foreign government, and hostile to its own prophets. Later, our reader may tire of travel or politics and turn to aesthetics. By his new lights, Ulysses becomes a multiply reflexive work; style is the subject as well as the medium of this meta-fiction. Or the work may turn forward another of its prismatic faces and lure him into a study of metaphysics, theosophy, epistemology, psychoanalysis, or syntax. In contrast, the philosophical and psychological colors may fade along with the technical and archetypal, casting into relief the personal dimension of the work. Hence, it may dawn on our representative reader that Ulysses is really about the effort to return home and the difficulties of getting there, or it may seem that the novel centers on whether Bloom, at day's end, will go upstairs and join his unfaithful Penelope in bed.

But I do not want to be misunderstood as merely voicing the platitude that Ulysses is a great and various fiction that grows with the reader. Rather than view Joyce's first epic as being about the topics and ideas traditionally put forward as explaining or unlocking the work, it seems more enlightening altogether to view such material as the stuff through which Joyce posed his challenge to the received relationship of art and life. Without a doubt, that confrontation is in Ulysses raised to a power higher than is characteristic of any other work canonized in most American colleges and universities. The challenge emerges from the fact that the narrative is a masterpiece of semiotic pseudo-comprehensiveness; it is a model of cultural processes and materials. And it is the nature of this model, what it encompasses and what it marginalizes or excludes, that occupies me when I consider not this or that aspect of Ulysses but the work as a tenuous and vexing whole. Certainly, a margin—in addition to being a popular spot in critical discourse today—is the appropriate area for examination when studying the whole, not least because it defines a dialectical relationship between what is inside and what is regarded as external. As I read it, Ulysses calls into being a boundary that it challenges in order to reveal the formulaic nature of both life and art—and to evoke something not contained by the specific formulae it repeats. That "something" I will later label, in echo of Fredric Jameson's work, the "cultural unconscious" of Ulysses; it is the complex nostalgia that the work's probing of both mind and society centers on.

But first, to underscore the peculiar relationship of ars and vita that Ulysses explores, I must recur to a day not long ago that I spent in the National Library of Ireland. While doing some research into Irish censorship, I ran across an open letter written in 1885 by a Mr. Frederick J. Gregg to the Dublin University Review. Mr. Gregg claimed to have overheard an attendant at the National Library tell a reader "that Walt Whitman's poems had been suppressed." Gregg asked about this matter and was informed that the librarian, William Archer, had in fact banned or withheld the volume from circulation. Gregg then proceeded to defend Leaves of Grass as a great book, which he found, despite the objections of some critics, not "indelicate." In fact, he calculated that only eighty of its 9,000 lines could be considered objectionable.2 In a letter of response printed the following month, Archer denied having suppressed Whitman,but what caught my eye in this controversy was the cited address of the open-minded Gregg: 6, Eccles Street, Dublin. Delighted at the possibility that Gregg was Leopold Bloom's next-door neighbor, I was playfully pulled at once in two directions. First, I wanted to check Thorn's Directory to see how long Mr. Gregg had resided on Eccles Street; was he there in 1903 when the Blooms "moved in"?3 At the same time, I thought of the ironies of Stephen Dedalus's disappointing conversation with the intelligentsia at the National Library. Whether or not Archer's defense was any more accurate than Gregg's accusation, it is woefully appropriate that after having his place at the Tower usurped by Haines, Stephen should find no better reception in the library than was apparently accorded to Whitman. In another corner of my mind, I wondered in which room of the current library the conversation of Stephen, Mulligan, A.E., Eglinton, Best, and company "took place." Clearly, there are problems involved in such speculation, not the least of which is punctuation; are double quotation marks (like those I've used above) the appropriate markers for verbs that refer to the projected-as-real actions of Joyce's characters? A similar difficulty plagued Richard Best, who, having been absorbed into the world of Ulysses, felt that he had to defend his status as a nonfictional person.4 He had to fight against the quotation marks that forever surrounded his name once it was used in Ulysses.

At this point in the history of Ulysses criticism, it is not necessary to document in detail the curious effect that the novel creates from its reference to an overwhelming number of details from the real Dublin. Nor need we linger long over the book's own oblique comments upon its narrative practice. It may be sufficient to note that Scylla and Charybdis, the episode in which Stephen devotes extensive theoretical ingenuity to elaborating his theory that Shakespeare wrote his life into his art, begins with words that comically highlight the literary uses of life:

Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:

—And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister. A great poet on a great brother poet. A hestitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.

He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.

A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a noiseless beck.

—Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful ineffec- tual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.

Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. (U, 9.1-12)

The librarian measures art by its echoing of "real life," but his words and actions as Ulysses presents them echo the works he has read and are narrated to us in a self-consciously artificial style. In the brief passage quoted above, we find not only that the librarian's romantic notion of literary truth relies on Goethe but also that the texture of his "life" blends phrases from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Ceasar, and the Essays in Criticism: Second Series of Matthew Arnold.5Clearly figuring the process by which texts make our reality, Joyce continually quotes both other works and his own, extending the reflexive gesture of his fiction to include all of the life that the tradition ofWestern fiction has created.

The significance of Joyce's varied and insistent mingling of art and life is not exhausted when we merely cite his idiosyncratic attachment in the narrative to the facts of his experience of Dublin. At least two aspects of Ulysses come to mind as germane to our understanding of this narrative practice. The first is Joyce's well-advertised narrative "innovation" in Ulysses—one that attracted much of the initial attention to the text. I refer to Joyce's use of the interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness techniques. A second relevant matter is the rough adherence of the book's design to the encyclopedic schemata that Joyce circulated to Carlo Linati, Stuart Gilbert, and Herbert Gorman. I want to discuss here the persistence with which Ulysses looks and moves in both directions—interior and schematic—at once. With its attention to the supposed workings of the mind and the revelation of the inner identity of Western man, the stream-of-consciousness technique appeals to our sense of what is natural—to the life, particularly the unconscious life, that we seem to share. With its attention to many of the categories by which the Westen world knows itself, this schematic book directs us toward a concept of culture, toward the domain of art. Life and art, nature and culture—on these grand dichotomies Ulysses is constructed, and to the exploration of these oppositions as such the fiction is dedicated. From this process of assertion and challenge, which describes what Ulysses does at its margins, comes, I believe, the force of the narrative for a surprisingly diverse community of readers.

Stream of Consciousness: "Nature It Is" (U, 18.1563)?

Arthur Power tells us of an intriguing conversation in which Joyce maintained that Ulysses explored parts of the psyche that had never before been treated in fiction; "the modern theme," Joyce argued, "is the subterranean forces, those hidden tides which govern everything and run humanity counter to the apparent flood: those poisonous subtleties which envelop the soul, the ascending fumes of sex."6 The means of this revelation have long been discussed,7 the techniques employed by Joyce including third-person narration attuned to the speech mannerisms and thought patterns of the character under attention, direct dialogue, interior monologue, and seeming transcription of thoughts in sentence or fragmentform. There's no question that Joyce's approximation of the flow of consciousness, although dependent on at least fragments of words, represents a significant experimental attempt to portray the movements of the mind; hence, quite early in the presentations of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, the narrative begins to employ this crucial modernist technique. By the fourth page of the book, we find ourselves eased from narration per se into Stephen's first fully presented thought, "As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too" (U, 1.136-37). Elegaic, measured, rhetorical—these few comments introduce us to Stephen's mind and set the tone for much of his moody selfassessment on 16 June 1904. Similarly, by the eleventh line of Calypso, the episode in which we meet Leopold Bloom, we find fragments of directly "reported" thought punctuating the third-person narration:

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. (U, 4.11-14)

Likewise, from the first word of Penelope, Molly may be regarded as speaking, or rather thinking, her mind.

In one sense, then, Ulysses constantly and with ever-greater fervor moves us close to life not only by signaling about certain word-units, "These are an individual's most personal thoughts," but also by directing those thoughts toward a wide range of topics, including many subjects obviously unsuitable for polite conversation in Joyce's Dublin. For instance, Bloom recalls his love-making with Molly on Howth and ponders Milly's budding sexuality; he thinks that he might masturbate in the bath; he considers Gerty's serviceable underwear. Stephen rejects both the corpse-chewing God of his imagination and the ghost of his mother; he broods over his social usurpation by medicine man and conqueror; he probes the mysteries of sex and birth. Molly thinks of Boylan, Bloom, Mulvey, Stephen, Rudy, Milly, and a host of other people; she appreciates her soft thighs and firm breasts; she remembers with joy various sexual experiences; she declares her belief in her own powers of seduction. Ulysses asks us to view these passages as reporting the kinds of things that most real people think even if they do not always say them, and readers generally go along with the game, many of them marveling, as Carl Jung did, at Joyce's psychological acumen. That is, the narrative asks for our tacit agreement that the art of Ulysses mirrors life.But in addition, we are asked to agree that life is like art, that our own thoughts emerge just as spontaneously as those of Joyce's characters not out of a void of preverbal desire but out of the Active discourses and received ideas among and through which we live. Consider Stephen as he walks along Sandymount Strand: freed from friends and foes alike, he occupies himself with speculations on God, fatherhood, consubstantiality, aesthetics, sensation, women, language, library slips, and his own rotting teeth. Although Nestor ends with the supposed comment of a supposed omniscient narrator ("On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins" "U, 2.448-49"), Proteus begins by confronting us immediately with the language of Stephen's thoughts: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read …" (U, 3.1-2). The entire first paragraph presents part of Stephen's somber witty meditation on vision, knowledge, and the reality of the external world. From these thoughts, we learn that the young Dubliner, supposed by Homeric design to be in search of his father / Father, is wondering how he'll know him if he meets him, with the emphasis on how. The process of knowing and the perils of that process occupy Stephen's interior experience as he defines for himself the bottom line of cognitive possibility ("at least that if no more, thought through my eyes") and accepts the challenge of living as he sees it (not to be able to say with Mr Deasy "/paid my way" "U, 2.251" but to read the "Signatures of all things"). Stephen's thoughts here, as Weldon Thornton, John Killham, Hugh Kenner, and others have documented,8 are mainly derived from philosophic or mystic masters like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Boehme. 

The precision and inventiveness with which Stephen weaves together bits and pieces from their texts are his own, of course, but it is the implied presence of such texts that structures his thinking.Possibly Stephen's awareness of the claustrophic hovering of Western cultural tradition both outside and within his mind accounts in part for his nostalgic search for a non-received language of gesture. As he drunkenly describes the project to Lynch in Circe, he wants to transcend derivation from intermediary texts and to speak the "structural rhythm" of things. To create or use such a "universal language" would be to find "the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy" (U, 15.106-7). Hours after his walk on the strand, Stephen returns to the question of the visible and his hope that he can both read the language of nature and learn to speak it. Alas, Stephen's illustrative gestures allude to"the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar" (U, 15.117); The Rubaiyat is for the moment the dominant work, although not the only one giving contextual significance to Stephen's gestures. One of the things that Joyce's insistent alluding makes clear is that thinking, the streaming of consciousness, the content of interior monologue, the very shape of the self are woven from the materials of one's culture. Fair Tyrants joins The Odyssey and a host of other books in accounting for the contours of individual experience in the narrative; such works insure that whatever the stream of consciousness accomplishes in terms of artistic technique, it does not provide even the shadow of an access to a mythical human nature within or behind or beyond or above those informing texts. The art that seems to bring us closer to life seems to show us that art constitutes life and that nature as we can know it is always only culture. This conclusion, though familiar enough in contemporary thought, had its own radical charm in Joyce's day; it clearly fascinated Joyce enough for him to devote years to charting its implications.A similar point might be made in our consideration of Molly's thoughts as they are rendered in Penelope. Even without knowing Joyce's famous description of her chapter as "perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrew limited prudent indifferent 'Weib,' "9 readers would have identified Molly with nature. Her ready acceptance of sexual difference and of different sexualities, her flowing speech and overt desiring, her maternity and menstruation, all mark Molly's Gea-Tellus status and distinguish her from the more intellectual Stephen and Bloom. This assessment of Molly recurs throughout Joyce criticism. And yet, however fundamentally unreflective she may appear to be, Molly's "thoughts"exhibit as much of the reflexive quality of language as do Stephen's. For example, the almost continuous pressure of syntactic ambiguity in her monologue ("the german Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me" "U, 18.95-96") urges on the reader the constructedness of that prose and its attention to itself as language. Similarly, the eight "sentences" of Penelope and the "8 big poppies because mine was the 8th" (U, 18.329-30), like her reference to other books that have Mollys in them, nudge the reader into seeing Ulysses as a world of ambiguous and constantly shifting signs.10 Like the Circe episode, which pretends to be a descent into the unconscious but constantly cycles out into the comedy of received ideas, Penelope paints the mind almost exclusively as the site on which convention and cliche register. And yet, perhaps because of Molly's own enthusiastic embracing of the natural ("God of heaven theres nothing like nature" "U, 18.155859"), or because of the convention by which women are construed to be closer to nature than men,11 readers have often coded her as the Flesh or Nature or Life that Stephen must embrace before he can become an artist. Elaine Unkeless directly attacks this view in her recent essay, "The Conventional Molly Bloom," in which she argues that Joyce's portrait mostly restricts Molly to "preconceived ideas of the way a woman thinks and behaves."12 

Hence, our response to Molly as Earth Mother is based on our conventional notions of what constitutes naturalness. Drawing that artificial nature into the text, Molly's interior monologue is not unshaped thought but idea and self-image structured by society. The episode conveys at best a nostalgia for primal authenticity voiced from within the heart of culture. This voice echoes Stephen's sense that the "self" is "ineluctably preconditioned to become" what it is (U, 15.2120-21); such conditioning, as we see it in Ulysses, is largely social.The ersatz quality of nature in Ulysses is perhaps most pointedly conveyed when Joyce's Dubliners go on or think about going on holiday outside of Dublin. Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce vacation at a seaside of musichall clichés; Bloom recalls a "High School excursion" (U, 15.3308) to the falls at Poulaphouca, the most typical of tourist day-trips from the city. In Eumaeus, the narrative portrays Bloom as pompously and hilariously holding forth on the value of such trips; "the man in the street," he feels, "merited a radical change of venue after the grind of city life in the summertime for choice when Dame Nature is at her spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life." Bloom cites Poulaphouca, Wicklow, "the wilds of Donegal," and Howth as suitable spots in which to become attuned to nature (U, 16.551, 552-54, 557). Similarly, Simon Dedalus seems able to conceive of nothing farther outside Dublin than the fifty-mile-away Mourne mountains: "—By Jove, he mused, I often wanted to see the Mourne mountains" (U, 11.219). Significantly, in Sirens that wish becomes part of the linguistic play of that extraordinarily reflexive episode: he speaks and drinks with "faraway mourning mountain eye" (U, 11.273). Even when Ulysses deals with animals, natural behavior is subsumed by cultural vision. Consider Bloom's conversation with his cat.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.—Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps. (U, 4.24-42)

Bloom's early morning interchange with Molly parallels this scene. Molly's twice-repeated "Poldy" and insistence that he hurry with the tea are forms of mild anxious, aggressive purring. Bloom "calmly" gazes at Molly's "large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder" (U, 4.304-5), much as he observes the cat's whiskers and sheen: "Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes" (U, 4.21-23). Molly drinks her tea with a degree of self-absorption also found in the milk-lapping "pussens." Of course, the cat does not question Bloom on the meaning of metempsychosis, but the narrative does suggest that the feline and the female share a quality that the book is working hard to capture. Again, many readers have taken this kind of connection at face value and have asserted that Molly is not only artless; she is nature itself. But we need only recur to the description of the cat to be aware of the nonobjective rendering of experience in Ulysses. On the one hand, it is the subjective Bloom who sees cruelty as natural to a cat and masochism as natural to mice. On the other hand, for the narrative to portray a cat as having "avid shameclosing eyes" that are "narrowing with greed" is not even to pretend to a neutral description; animal "nature" is indistinguishable from imposed interpretation. To be sure, there is much about cats that Bloom does not know: he is unsure of how he looks from the cat's perspective; he thinks its feelers might "shine in the dark." But to observe these gaps in his knowledge, especially the latter, is only to recognize that this modern Odysseus has merely blundered about in his culture's encyclopedia of texts and has emerged from his brief schooling with his facts awry. Bloom's view of what is natural and his quest to understand the essence of things lead only to conventional wisdom and comically fractured received ideas.In portraying the unreflective and animal, the text undoes our belief in the natural by circling us back to the social and to a language that purposefully confuses nature and culture. Despite the narrative's evident desire to uncover "subterranean forces" in the mind, the presentation of minds in progress remains a combination of old materials in new ways. In general, the primal unconscious mind, unknowable in words, is evoked— only to be blocked or even denied by the strategies, styles, and content of the fiction. And yet, there is the occasional exception to this statement. For example, Stephen's description of the self, which I mentioned above (the "self" is "ineluctably preconditioned to become" what it is), suggests a contradiction—that the self is culturally conditioned to assume a certain shape, and that identity is conditioned by certain unnamed inevitabilities. These ineluctable forces seem to have, because of their sheer predetermination, the status of natural forces. What intrigues me here is the summoning up of an unknown sphere of inevitability and instinct, which appears to counter the recurrently asserted constructedness of all conditioning forces and the reflexively self-contained quality of Ulysses.

The Schema: Encyclopedism and the Unknown

Ulysses produces within the terms of its own artistry an illusion of unmediated mind, of unstructured consciousness. At the same time, the narrative announces the dominion of culture over nature. In tandem with his ambivalent approach to the unknown unconscious, Joyce explored what in his notes for Ithaca he calls the "as yet unknown."13 This negative space within and outside the text is suggested by the known, the disciplines that make up Western culture and on which Joyce drew for his many allusions. From that body of knowledge, Ulysses generates problems of heuristics, epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics; it also produces lacunae, ambiguities, and our sense of what I have alluded to as the "cultural unconscious" (a concept discussed below by way of conclusion). One efficient way to deal with this version of the enigmatic while developing an argument about Joyce's portrayal of consciousness, is to explore Joyce's own abstracts of Ulysses, the schemata that he prepared for his friends as aids to textual explication.14 Certainly, the schemata cannot be considered authoritative guides to the fiction, for they are themselves only Joyce's fictions about Ulysses. Nonetheless, they continue to be reprinted, drawn on for clues, and distributed as hard classroom guides to the book. David Hayman's widely used study, Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning, includes a version of the charts. Similarly, Richard Ellmann's now classic Ulysses on the Liffey and Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman's Notes forJoyce both liberally incorporate schemata information as readily as do many Joyce scholars when they want to emphasize this or that point of interpretation. Hence, although no one would grant the charts a sacrosanct status, very few readers, scholars, and teachers of Joyce have eschewed their use altogether.

The Linati-Gorman-Gilbert charts have long puzzled those readers who seek in them the keys to the work or a simplified model of its meanings. In fact, the lists of places, times, organs, arts and sciences, colors, symbols, stylistic techniques, and Homeric correspondences tend to muddy the waters. Attempting to take the charts seriously, we often pose more questions than answers. Some questions involve the seeming overexplicitness of the charts; for example, what relationship does the "technic" of "tumescence / detumescence" have to the meaning of Nausicaa beyond underscoring the already obvious sexual encounter of Bloom and Gerty MacDowell? Why, amidst the Homeric citations of the Correspondences, is it necessary to mention that the Stephen of Telemachus is like Hamlet? Other questions probe strategy. Why do episodes such as Lestrygonians, Eumaeus, and Ithaca lack designated colors? What accounts for the choice of listed organs? (Why, for instance, is there no episode for the gall bladder? Why are both muscle and flesh given space?) Still other questions involve relationships among parts of the schema or the interpretation of individual items. How much do Homeric details control, for instance, the problems of organicity mentioned above? Does the art of Calypso, in Stuart Gilbert's version designated as "economics," suggest or include, as has been argued, "home economics"? Any reader of the charts could supply a sizable list of queries.Yet surely to pose such questions is to seek significance without first attending to the very process of categorization. Certainly, each column suggests a body of knowledge or a frame of reference in a way that highlights the conventionalities of Western culture. Like a university displaying in its catalogue its arbitrary division into what used to be regarded as self-evidently coherent "disciplines," Joyce's charts accept and even seem to authorize a divide-and-conquer mentality; they signify atomization as much as the encyclopedic wholeness that, following Joyce's lead, we often assume to be the point of the schematization.15 Hence, it is important that the bodily organs, the symbols, the colors—all the columns—are made analogous or homologous to the arts and sciences, the disciplines through which our culture marshals and imposes the information it generates. Music, medicine, and mechanics, like theology and magic, are in Ulysses the categories by which a social status quo is maintained. Similarly, the many "scenes" that Joyce's schemata list and that his narrative describes are the typical points of political and socioeconomic domination. School, house, graveyard, newspaper office, library, streets, tavern, hospital, brothel, cabman's shelter, house, and bed—the city scape is broken down into its institutional components, and these elements redefine as a cultural site the "natural" strand along which both Bloom and Stephen walk during their shared day. That Joyce was able to find in Ireland many a comic and many a serious parallel for the details of the society Homer portrays in The Odyssey reinforces our sense that Joyce's text reproduces the traditional organization of Western culture. The categories dividing and ruling the Dublin of 1904, including male and female, young and old, potent and impotent, rich and poor, country and city, science and theology, heart and loins, citizens and revolutionaries, are all implied by the terms of the schemata. They form a statement about what Joyce shows us in Ulysses, the swallowing up of the instinctual and unprogrammed by a form of highly organized urban culture that assimilates all experience. They represent the impossibility of conceiving of the self and of exploring nature, human and otherwise, except through this or a similar conceptual paradigm.

To summarize, both from within and from without Ulysses announces its approximation to a nature that is in fact absent from the work. The stream-of-consciousness technique, which seems to transcribe real thoughts and their typical patterns of association, may be more accurately described as documenting the emergence of what appear to be personal thoughts from an impersonal environment of conventions and texts. The schemata, which have long been used as external but reasonably reliable abstracts of Ulysses,must be recognized as signifying a wholeness or encyclopedism that they in fact undermine from within as they present more lacunae and differentiations than clues to coherence.This external evidence from Joyce's charts provides suggestions that are borne out in the narrative. For instance, Ulysses is a book of divisions more insistent than those divisions of economic convenience, the Victorian novel's "parts," or even than those units of mnemonic and pedagogical convenience, novelistic chapters. Eschewing such conventions, the narrative refuses to divide itself using titles, numbers, or asterisks. On the other hand, the movement from one episode to another becomes increasingly clear in Ulysses owing to the changes in point of view and style. Like the analytic schemata, the narrative achieves through these unpredictable shiftings not only a quasi-encyclopedic scope but also a content that refuses at many points to compose a seamless whole.

In addition, just as the schemata do not make self-evident the logic behind the selection of arts and sciences they list, so Joyce's book fails to provide an Ur-rationale for all of the varied philosophical, philological, historical, mythical, literary, scientific, mathematical, and other information put to use in the narrative. Instead, the text seems to ground the information used in the story in the minds of its characters and to suggest that somehow Bloom, Stephen, and Molly directly or indirectly access their culture's most spiritually valuable knowledge. Certainly, one might argue that the controlling aim of Stephen's agonized self-examination is to engineer from the cultural material at his disposal an intuitive knowledge of some unifying code-system or other means of establishing connections among divine and human, person and person, philosophic theory and poetic lyric; this and more he appears to signify in the phrase "that word known to all men" (U, 3.435). Further, as already noted, Stephen's drunken entrance into Nighttown, during which he declares to Lynch his desire for a universal "language of gesture," recalls his morning's contemplation of the confluence of and perhaps potent parallels among natural process, linguistic variety, and primal matter. For all of his Aristotelianism, Stephen is also attracted to Giordano Bruno's Neoplatonic quest for grand design and substantial unity; he wants to connect the language of culture to the perhaps mystic vocabulary of nature and divinity. But the most that Stephen achieves is his morning's ironic restatement of Western humanity's chain of being: "God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain" (U, 3.47779). Like Bloom, who repeatedly puzzles over the exact wording of various scientific principles as well as over their meaning ("Black conducts, reflects, "refracts is it?", the heat" "U, 4.79-80"; "what's parallax?" "U, 8.578"), Stephen has access to only a part—and arguably a marginal part— of human knowledge. Despite the frequently cited suggestion that Stephen represents Art and Bloom Science ("What two temperaments did they individually represent? The scientific. The artistic" "U, 17.559-60"), their interaction in Ithaca does not encourage the view that together they form a "whole" person with "complete" knowledge, or even that they together possess an epistemologically sound and comprehensive approach to human experience.Hence, the extraordinarily diverse body of information alluded to in Ulysses defines an encyclopedism that is at best hollow; it serves to emphasize the distinctions which the schemata present in abstract—not wholeness but discrete sets that defy and thwart holism, terms for the deployment of institutional power. Given this framework, the more details Joyce added to typescript, galley, and proofsheet, the more he signified in his practice the futility of the encyclopedic enterprise: he could never include all of even the culturally selected information at his disposal. Yet ironically, as Joyce embroidered into Ulysses the names of flowers, references to science, Homeric allusions, and the like, the text did take on a "life" of its own. That is, it engaged with the energy of Western culture in absorbing into its organizational and conceptual paradigms any raw material exposed to it. But this process, by which facts become ideology, is a hegemonic activity, whether in a society or in a work like Ulysses that reiterates its social environment. Hence, more than representing unity and completeness, Joyce's fictional encyclopedism reproduces and critiques the dominating divisions at the heart of the Irish life that he shows us.Finally, like the schemata, the narrative prompts many questions and cannot help revealing many gaps, especially in the sphere of characterization. Like the schemata's list of "Organs," the text's references to organs, added together, would not form a whole individual, but only a textualized and scattered Osiris. Like the "Technics," which may appear to imply voices but actually include only such substitutes as "Narrative (mature)" and "Catechism (impersonal)," the narrative's voices are less personal than cultural. Above, I have tried to establish the sense in which Ulysses pretends to reveal identities but in fact undermines our traditional concept of mind by clearly deriving the content of consciousness from existingtexts and conventions. As Ulysses has it, individuals conceive the truth of their selfhood to rest not in theenclosing culture but in an unspecifiable and largely inaccessible personal unconscious. Yet the deriveddiscourses of Ulysses create a different sense of what it is to be a person in Joyce's world: one lives within a stream of consciousness that is finally not distinct from other discursive streams; one can never fullyknow the external imperatives that shape desire and condition action. In Ulysses, then, the signifiers ofnature and individuality are indistinguishable from those of culture and conventionality.

A fiction often read as struggling to present the unified complexity of consciousness,16Ulysses thus produces characters largely reduced to compilations of received fictions enacting a life that at best recalls the natural by arguing the narrative's nostalgia for it. As a fragmented product, the narrative ultimately signifies something other than itself, a kind of "cultural unconscious" that can never be known except through the styles and strategies of the narrative, which transmit restricted ideological practices and stylized versions of lived experience. The enclosing culture does not know but substitutes for a nature that is never trapped in discourse, for what is missing from Ulysses—the living tissue of consciousness and a Gestalt that exceeds the mechanically charted—is missing as well from the society Joyce shows us; at the very least, the "cultural unconscious" that Ulysses evokes is perpetually chased, never grasped. The result of Joyce's carefully engineered intersection of the social and the narrative is his exposing the insufficiency of our knowledge of self and society. For fifty years, readers have explained to one another what Stephen, Bloom, and Molly are really like, have unearthed the real reasons for Stephen's brooding inactivity, for Bloom's similar paralysis, for Molly's adultery. Ulysses has thrown the seeker after causes from Bruno to Vico to Aristotle to Jacob Boehme to Gaelic etymology to topographical study to Krafft-Ebing to Richmal Mangnall to the study of Joyce's school records. In these and in many other sources, valuable information has been discovered; we have enlarged our knowledge of what Joyce did know or could have known. We have understood more about the impact of life on art, even while the absorption of the first into the second demonstrated the artifice within both nature and culture. That is, Joyce's stream of consciousness is a gathering of discursive fragments from culture, and the schemata denote only an engineered unity that the novel partly produces and partly rejects—the unity of philosophic systems, the merely logical internal coherence of a cultural system or paradigm. The unconscious and the unknown are the same absent figures for both Ulysses and life, for nature and for a culture which cannot know themselves fully.

The Cultural Unconscious

Above, the term "cultural unconscious" referred to something unrepresented in Ulysses, whose reality is nonetheless affirmed, or at least desired, by the narrative. Ulysses, that is, may be read as nostalgically yearning to embody discursively the nature that it posits as desirable and necessary for truly gratifying human experience. To this end, Ulysses asserts its status as an encyclopedic book, as a work so comprehensive that it implies or can even capture glimpses of raw motivation, nonideological concept, and uninstitutionalized experience. Bloom's thoughts, however continuously impinged upon and shaped by the city through which he moves, appear to offer the possibility of connection to uncensored impulse and unconditioned emotion. Especially when Bloom drifts off to sleep after his remote encounter on the beach with Gerty MacDowell, we seem to enter a gentle drift of uncontrolled idea, and this event seems to promise deep revelation when the reader gets to Circe. But the expectation is never fulfilled. In its place, the narrative provides a cycling through one cultural proposition after another. The minds that we see in Ulysses are very much the products of their environment, and tracking down the things alluded to in those minds has consistently driven scholars to the world external to the text. The book's cultural unconscious remains an inaccessible force which motivates the various searches by character, author, and reader for the chemical that will transform charted fragments into luminous certitudes about consubstantiality, the incorruptibility of the soul, and the meaning of experience.In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson uses a term similar to "cultural unconscious," and clearly my own phrase alludes to his; in fact, the line of reasoning that Jameson follows in his exciting"Introduction" and problematic "Conclusion" must be partly rehearsed here if I am to round out my sense of the work enacted in Ulysses. Early in his study, Jameson states his belief that a chief task of the narrative analyst is to see every story as part of the "single great collective story" of, as Marx and Engels would have it, " 'oppressor and oppressed.' "17 Jameson contends, "It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity."

Whereas Jameson sees the "political unconscious" as a "master-narrative" of historical struggle which is inscribed in various ways into every literary work, I find that in addition Ulysses has inscribed into it also a cultural master-narrative (no doubt specific to the social formation in and through which the work was written) of human connection with primal instinct and authentic wholeness. This vision, what Jacques Derrida and others might subsume into a myth of plenitude, might also be viewed as the logical outcome of bourgeois reality in a world of increasing social fragmentation, reification, alienation, and commodification. By this line of reasoning, nature is construed as transcendent or at least as a good to be sought outside of or in the usually unexamined folds of culture. The cultural unconscious is thus a narrative of nature which emerges from the pressure of modern society, though it has obvious affinities with the pastoral vision of earlier centuries and with various countercultural ("back-to-nature") movements of the postmodern decades. A Lacanian might argue additionally that this cultural unconscious, however much it may be a social construct, nonetheless functions as a motivating Other, a nature that speaks culture. Thus, nature is less a place or an ideal than it is a discourse whose themes are wholeness and psychological or even spiritual integrity. The measure of Bloom's and Stephen's inevitable defeat by a manipulative society is their steady inability to procure imaginative access to this extracultural language. The measure of the narrative's affirmation of this discourse's potency is the constant stream of coincidence that textures the fiction and tempts us always to discern within difference the presence of consubstantiality, connection, and communication. The nature in question here is quite other than the ideological construct that marks Molly as Gea-Tellus and as earthily polyphiloprogenitive; the latter marks only desire in submission to convention, while the former "exists" in the negative space outside the text.One of Jameson's aims in The Political Unconscious is to broaden Marxist theory from its well-known concern with démystification to a recognition that "all literature must read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community."18 To be sure, Ulysses itself accomplishes many kinds of démystification; the narrative's exploration of selfhood, gender distinctions, family relations, the social order, and Anglo-Irish interaction vigorously exposes the ideological practices shaping these concepts and dominating much of the life in Joyce's city.19 However, Ulysses also addresses the issue of community, both by demonstrating the absence of the communal in the Dublin of 1904 and by emphasizing the events, actions, thoughts, and dreams linking meandering Stephen and wandering Bloom. In a city marked by clerical, patriarchal, economic, and political domination, Joyce signifies a consubstantiality of characters which, liberated from the theological doctrine that Stephen brings to the coding of coincidence, alludes to the many varieties of collectivity that the narrative aggressively lacks. Thus to contribute here my own coding of the characters' experience is neither sheer fabrication nor mere figure. Rather, to do so is to extrapolate the desire for community (as a version of nature) from the kinds of anomie experienced by Bloom, Stephen, and Molly; from the recurrent critical efforts to account for the novel's odd blend of depressing details and exuberant wit; and from Joyce's persistent interest in social forms and theories.20

One place in which theories abound is the penultimate episode of Ulysses, and it is from this site of rationalization that the cultural unconscious asserts its discourse of nature and community. In fact, it is the contradiction between culture and unconscious that accounts for the mixed readings of that chapter. Many critics have argued that despite the pseudo-scientific perspective, the narrative allows, via the good offices of Epps's Cocoa, a symbolic communion of father and son. Other readers maintain that even to suggest a meeting of minds is to indulge in the novelistic sentimentality that Joyce abhorred. But I detect in the Blephen Stoom encounter the same voice of desire for nature that shapes the consensus perception of Molly as Earth Mother. It is not just by convention that readers have found Molly to be natural; such a reading also emerges from the dialectic between the culture and its unconscious. Strictly speaking, of course, we can never know the difference between these two terms; certainly, those of us who are caught within Western language and logic can conceive of the cultural unconscious only by analogy to our thoroughly conventional experience. What we can know, as Vico proclaimed and Joyce undoubtedly noted, is the "world of civil society" (what Vico also calls the world of the "gentiles"), which "has certainly been made by men." Vico strictly distinguishes the humansphere from "the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows."21 Given the predilection for etymological study that Vico and Joyce shared, it is of interest that the word "nature" has affinities with the Indo-European root gene-, from which "gentile" derives; that is, "nature" contains Vico's world of culture. On the other hand, as anyone with an American Heritage Dictionary can determine, the word "culture" shares its Indo-European root kwel- with "entelechy," the Aristotelian term that Stephen seems in Circe to associate with the quidditas of an object. Perhaps because nature and culture writes themselves in each other, Joyce's fiction nostalgically projects wholeness despite the undeniable fragmentation in the work and its framing world.Less positive assessments of Joyce's fiction have, of course, always been made. Early readers of Ulysses emphasized the "waste land" of Dublin life as portrayed by Joyce, and shades of that reaction color many different readings of the narrative, from Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce (1956) to Franco Moretti's "The Long Goodbye." Moretti's argument about Ulysses, which appears in his very instructive Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), interests me because he argues unequivocally for Joyce's portrait of a Dublin caught in the "crisis of liberal capitalism," a "negative utopia" informed by the author's "consummate scepticism." Moretti grounds this view in the notion that the specific Irish context of the narrative is far less important than is the pressure of English economic history.22 

That is, the essay screens out the very details that Ulysses uses (the life it absorbs into art) to strike a balance between dystopia and community. Such a detail occurs in Aeolus, in which the stalled trams call to mind not only the celebrated paralysis of Dublin life as Joyce portrayed it in his short stories but also the 1913 Dublin Lock-Out.23 That the Lock-Out was a brutally effective management strategy only highlights its equal success in generating some measure of class-consciousness. Such solidarity Jameson links to the Utopian desire for a communal society which he discerns in many literary works. Joyce's own text claims both less and more through its portrayal of the stalled trams, for swirling around those few paralyzed machines is the ongoing life of the city of words in which Irish laborers pursue their tasks, an Irish dilettante named Dedalus ponders consubstantiality, an Irish canvasser named Bloom seeks community, and the discourses of modern social life force us to recognize the significance of what is not said. It is at the margins of Joyce's discourse, where life and art entangle, that the dialectic of nature and culture enacts the work, in both senses, that we call Ulysses.