Chloë Joan López
chlo'jo'lo'
Buzz Off, Buzz Off

There was the dream, the dream of a big metal hand. Give that sucker a hand! Give it up for Longinus B!

What else was there?

I feel I should have something for you today, on 02 02 2002, but I don't think I do. Ice doesn't do shear well, but it does do strain. Think of that noise for me, the noice of ice twisting in the tray, or seizing in something hot to drink. When you do that, put the ice in the hot liquid, imagine the layers of strain, you know, how the outside takes a new shape but the center is still cold. It makes me think of trapezoids. A trapezoid is a square that's moving really fast. What would Einstein think of that?

I meant parallelogram. Who put the ell in parallel?

But it would have to be moving crosswise to its axes of symmetry. So saith I.

Here's something to think about again: the Whorf hypothesis. Some of what I've read of late says that people who deride Whorf haven't read Whorf. This supposedly includes Mr Pinker. I guess my next trick will to be to read Whorf.

To me, and my intuitive sense, however, it seems that it stands to reason that if you have a word for "big red fluttery thing with seven horns and seven diadems," and I don't, you are saying something different when you say it than I am when I say "big red fluttery thing with seven horns and seven diadems." But I have a hard time saying why. To a poet it seems obvious though.

It also stands to reason that different cognitive processes interact with language in different ways. Just because color perception seems to be unaffected by language doesn't mean that other cognitive processes, even when relating to color, do not. And interpretation and perception are different things.

I am fully aware that the subjunctive mood and the habitual tense both look an awful lot like the present tense in english. This leads to some ambiguity. Even just on the very basic level of the pun, ambiguity will always exist. As has been pointed out, there are even puns in DNA, and I don't think we would really say that DNA carries meaning or is a language in the usual sense. Translate all these ambiguities into another language, and... well, you can't. Language is a big web. You know. "If that's a pain-cry, then language is a virus."

Humans are always fucking it up. They want to know where they're starting from. This is what you're starting from: the universe.

I'm also sick of hearing about how this kind of thinking is 'relativist' or 'anti-ethical' or 'self-undermining.' If that's what you think then you clearly don't understand it.