Mark Liberman at Language Log has written a nice post about the charge that linguistic descriptivism is a manifestation of what Nietzsche calls slave morality. Liberman is right in claiming that this does not make sense, but for the wrong reasons, I think. It is odd how so many who would cite Nietzsche in support […]
Earlier I noted how current writing technology tends to be the dominant metaphor of the mind. Related to this, is the tendency for writing technology to make a technological platform. Texting was the killer app for the cell phone, and the wordprocessor was the killer app for the PC. But before that, there was UNIX, […]
A little late reporting this, but Harvard adopted the open access mandate one month ago to the day. This is an important milestone in academic publishing. And an interesting example of how the culture of open source software is ramifying: The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits […]
“What would you rather do, edit text or process words?”, I once quipped. Funny, if unfair (since the aptness of a system’s nomenclature need not be a reflection of its quality). What I did not realize at the time was that there was a social reality manifest in the term “word processing”, that indeed it […]
What is direct quotation? You might think the answer is clear—it is the direct transcription of another’s words. In some contexts, however, it can be unclear what counts as a direct transcription. If that’s right, then direct quotation is vague, and its representation in structural markup is an idealization. Though I am no historian of […]
Though this is a blog about the technology of writing (primarily advocating the use of plain text alternatives over proprietary formats), I sometimes post about its history. Recent posts about “-30-” have led to another historical excursus. A comment on a post on Metahacker correctly claimed that the origin “-30-” was more “on the news […]
Well it turns out that teh internets are good for more than viral marketing, memes, and FUD. Mark Liberman’s Language Log posts have uncovered the true history and origin of “-30-“. Though why it, as opposed to other markup arcana, is subject to conflicting interpretation remains a mystery. All the more so since it is […]
Concerning the etymological speculation that I reported in the previous post Mark Liberman writes: In the absence of evidence, this sort of thing becomes a sort of large-scale game of Balderdash. Of course, there are theories in which all rational thought is an internal version of this style of post-doc story-telling… Well, I did describe […]
Language Log posts about the following erratum that brings to light an interesting piece of markup whose origin is shrouded in mystery: An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a trial […]
There is a nice piece in the Stanford Magazine about Donald Knuth author of TeX and METAFONT. Frustration with the quality of mathematical typesetting and the fact that publishers were moving from manual to digital layout prompted Knuth to write TeX: It had changed into a problem of bits, zeroes and ones. You put the […]
Rebecca Morelle of the BBC reports that advanced imaging technology revealed that a medieval prayer book containing within it works by Archimedes and Hyperides also contains a third text, a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories by Alexander of Aphrodisias. The prayer book was written by the thirteenth century scribe John Myronas. Dr. Noel describes the production […]
Joan Acocella’s review of the Iron Whim, a history of the typewriter that I discussed in an earlier post, has apparently prompted a minor dispute in Nietzsche scholarship. Nigel Warbuton of the Open University reports Accocela’s claim that Nietzsche used a typewriter. Indeed he owned the Hansen writing ball: The writing ball was developed by […]
As this blog is about the technology of writing, perhaps it is not too far off topic to post about its history. The New Yorker currently has a review of The Iron Whim, A Fragmented History of the Typewriter by Darren Wershler-Henry. While writing machines were being designed since at least the eighteenth century (many […]
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