This is Conlan » Language

Join the cause

Conlan — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:53:27 +0000

Experts, style guides, and Academy Award-winning actors agree. Help end the barbaric practice of using two spaces in between sentences.

Donate today!

Curses!

Conlan — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:51:48 +0000

As with most cultural pseudo-controversies, I’ve been fascinated and annoyed with both sides of the “naughty words” hullabaloo. Steven Pinker offers the best popular analysis I’ve seen, in The New Republic.

What the Fuck: Why We Curse:

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It’s not just that we don’t have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation.

(via Daring Fireball)

Brevity is the soul of wit. Which is why, as anyone can see, it’s so important to pare down (remove) every extraneous bit you can to the core, essential, and ultimately most important insight.

Conlan — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:08:33 +0000

I love boiling life down to simple axioms, finding the pithy proverbs that summarize everything neatly and wittily. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” It’s all part of my search for a Grand Unified Theory of WTF?

The trouble is, more often than not, they’re overly simplistic, if not blatantly ridiculous. Life will never be wholly contained in a string of words (even if the universe is shown to be wholly comprised of vibrating strings).

Further reflection on the quotes above quickly reveals their inanity. Persistence in the face of failure is often required to succeed. And sometimes the true friend is the only one who won’t stand by and watch you self-destruct.

On the other hand, not all epigrams are as trite. Chesteron had an uncanny knack for distilling truth into a few words:”Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” “Love means loving the unlovable – or it is no virtue at all.”

Perhaps the difference between the platitudes and the aphorisms is this: while platitudes mean less the more you think about them, the aphorisms mean more.

Like a Puritan prostitute

Conlan — Sun, 13 May 2007 07:38:00 +0000

Could this be the most ironic news lead ever?

Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that disasters such as worldwide famine and an obesity epidemic could destroy the U.S. health care system unless politicians begin to look ahead and cooperate.

I’m pretty sure, at least, that it says a lot about the state of our world.