Is a spider a bug? Is a tarantula a spider? Is a whale a fish? All of these could reasonably be answered either “yes” or “no” depending on how these categories are understood. Is there a correct way to categorize living things? The taxonomic hierarchy Why categorize at all? Humans, or our ancestors, identified similarities…
Category: Language
The stopless sentence
People write text messages in different ways just like people speak in different ways. While all these different communication styles tend to work equally well, they function differently and the way any given person does something has a purpose. There are of course patterns and even “text dialects” because everyone learns how to communicate from…
And sometimes i
Most English speakers know the vowels as “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y”. The reason for y’s ambivalent status is because it is often used as a consonant, as in “yes”, “you”, “kayak”, and “player”. It can also be used as a vowel, as in “sky”, “psychology”, “byte”, and “city”. Less often considered…
What does “include” mean? (2nd in a series on sovereign citizens)
They say nothing is certain but death and taxes, but some people think they can avoid at least one of these. This post is about the people who call themselves sovereignty advocates, state nationals, private men and women, etc., and whom others may call sovereign citizens, tax protestors, tax scammers, etc. In my post The…
Which side of the quotation mark does it go on?
I’m not a prescriptivist, I swear. As someone who is math-oriented (and maybe has some neurodivergent features), I like formal rules. I enjoy treating English grammar like a math problem; and, due to the circumstances of my upbringing, I am highly proficient at “standard” English. When I was younger I understood this to be a…
The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay
So-called “sovereign citizens” make up a collection of people with vaguely similar beliefs about government and the law. I say so-called not to deride people for calling themselves that, but rather because they often do not call themselves that. Instead, it has become a label that people in the mainstream use to describe individuals with…
What this blog is and why it is like how it is
“Thoughts on mind” is a very literal title. This blog consists of anything I happen to be thinking about, hence the diverse range of topics and lack of cohesion. I like explaining things, so a lot of posts are my explanations of things I’ve learned. This isn’t really meant to be authoritative. I mostly write…
Stories in the history of written language (part 7)
The origins of literature To define narrative formally is to accept, perhaps dangerously, the idea or the feeling that the origins of narrative are self-evident, that nothing is more natural than to tell a story or to arrange a group of actions into a myth, a short story, an epic, a novel. (Genette and Levonas…
Stories in the history of written language (part 6)
Writing systems in fiction Back in part 2, we looked at some writing systems that were invented rather than developing naturally over a long time. There are many more invented writing systems, namely those invented for fictional languages. J. R. R. Tolkien was a pioneer of fictional languages, being a real-world language expert himself. His…
Cluster definitions as an explanation for vague concepts
Vague concepts are fuzzy. They lack strict definitions and contain edge cases. One classical example is baldness: we would call a person bald even if they have three hairs on their head, so exactly how many hairs could someone have and still be bald? Another example is a heap of sand: a single grain of…
thoughts on mind 