Here is one such line:

It is not clear whether they like neon, are amused by the idea of liking neon, or are amused by the possibility that others will find it amusing that they are amused by the idea of liking neon.

What was I thinking?

I am not alone: Beg The Question has a concise explanation of why it is absolutely not fucking acceptable to use beg the question when you mean raise the question, handy cards to print out and hand over to those guilty of abusing the phrase and even a range of t-shirts promoting proper use.

Thank you, Brownpau, for your campaigning zeal.

Ethnophysiography is a new field of study that examines the categories that people use when conceptualizing and communicating about the landscape. Ethnophysiography is an ethnoscience, similar in its aims and scope to ethnobotany or ethnozoology (Berlin, 1992; Medin and Atran, 1999). It studies how people conceptualize the natural landscape, especially landforms and water bodies. Ethnophysiography relies heavily on ethnography as a method for obtaining information through interviews, description, and community participation. It focuses on kinds of things in the landscape, and aims to document in detail what things in the world are referred to by each term, and why.

From David M. Mark and Andrew G. Turk’s Ethnophysiography (PDF).

Fascinating stuff.

(Via, or, rather, stolen from Angermann2)

Quite often, these flyers also contain information about Colin’s doo-wop singing group.

Which is quite funny.

His latest flyer is also quite, er, funny:

Now, I can see how a non-racist person with a certain sense of humour might make a joke including the word ‘nigger’, but who in their right mind would distribute the above to half the homes in the West End, including, one assumes, several black households? And what’s with the spelling of boyz with a ‘z’? Is this a flyer for the first ever gay racist doo-wop choir?

I can only assume that Colin’s twin passions for DIY and doo-wop have finally pushed him over the edge. Either that or it’s a prank from anti-Colin forces.

It turns out that some cultures, including the Aymara, an Amerindian people who live in the Andes of Northern Chile, use the reverse of our English temporal metaphors.

…the researcher asks a woman to explain the origins of her culture. She starts by describing her parents’ generation, then her grandparents’, and so on, extending her arm further and further in front of her as she does so. Then she switches to talk about how the values of those earlier generations have been handed back to her (her hand gradually returns to her body from out front), and how she will in turn pass them on to her children (she thumbs over her shoulder).

This makes sense, perhaps more so than the prevailing tendency to look forward to the future. If we are using ourselves as a marker to represent the present, then the future is indeed behind us, in the sense that we cannot see it, while the past stretches out in front of us, with recent events right before our eyes, and the distant past, all misty, on the horizon.

Rafael Núñez, the cognitive scientist studying the Aymara, suspects that their ‘reverse’ metaphors are the result of a grammatical peculiarity.

Núñez thinks that the reason the Aymara think they way they do might be connected with the importance they accord vision. Every language has a system of markers which forces the speaker to pay attention to some aspects of the information being conveyed and not others. French emphasises the gender of an object (sa voiture , son livre), English the gender of the subject (his car, her book). Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”

Fascinating stuff. Too fascinating, in fact - I’ve wasted way too much, erm, time, wondering whether time is an ontological entity or conceptual framework, whether it’s an a priori deal, Kant-style, or part of a weird four dimensional block of post-Einstein spacetime, or even a load of bollocks, as suggested by J.M.E. McTaggart, who came up with a rather lovely lot of nonsense that, roughly, dismisses time in the same way that Zeno of Elea was uncertain of motion. And now this? I’ll be sitting here watching my brain ooze out of my ears for the next wee while, then. (Unless the Submit Response philosopher-in-chief, Leon, clears it all up in the comments.)

The German word Umlaut means roughly sound change, being composed of um- (a prefix often used with verbs involving “change”) and Laut, meaning “sound”.

Via, kinda, the always-splendid New Things weblog, which points to the Wikipedia Unusual Articles page.

Talking of playing records, or sound changing, I’ll be contributing to a Stet radio show, featuring a mix and some form of interview with myself and DJ Maggie Jones about the club on Subcity Radio. People living in Glasgow can tune in to 87.7 on the FM dial, others may click through to the Subcity website and access streaming audio in the MP3 and, rather wonderfully, Ogg Vorbis formats. The show is tentatively scheduled to air on the 10th of February - the time is as yet unconfirmed, so I’ll update as soon as I know more details.

The music I contribute will probably explore Machine Windrush territory - that’s a really stupid genre neologism I coined just this minute, since a lot of the records I play these days are, rhythmically speaking, Jamaican-born, and made in the UK, on computers and other machines. A possible, arguably more euphonious, alternative term: Tilbury Digital. (For those wondering what on earth I’m wittering about, this page might clear things up.)

Until today, I would have used quiddity to express that concept, which is a troublesome word, because, while it shares a meaning with haecceity, it is also roughly synonymous with words like cavil, nicety, quibble or trifle.

It always seemed very strange to me, that a word could refer to the essential is-ness of something, while its own essential is-ness was muddied by multiple meanings. Or, to put it another way, the quiddity of this or that is the answer to the question quid est? - what is it? - but when you ask that question of quiddity itself, the answer dents the concept of quiddity (as in haecceity), since the word means both haecceity and quibble, meanings that are, in a sense, contradictory. Though, of course, in another sense, since quiddity can never aspire to autologicality, perhaps its awkward pseudo-heterologicality could be seen as a comment on the possible impossibility of haecceity.

Sorry, I lost myself there, let alone anyone reading.

Whatever, haecceity trumps quiddity for me, from now on in. I just hope it’s a concept I’ll genuinely need to express sometime soon, as it’s not really the sort of thing you can casually drop into everyday conversation, or even everyday writing. And I’m just bursting to.