Mekhitar Garabedian Fig.a, a comme alphabet 2009-2010 Pencil, pen and marker on paper 29 x 42 cm
thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm
amycvdh reblogged
Donate if you can, and even if you can’t, spend some time this November educating yourself about the history of the very-much-still-alive tribe that sat down with the pilgrims, the continued history of colonization in America, and about the tribe/s whose land you are occupying.
amycvdh reblogged
To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. Cy Twombly
"...the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission ... has orbited the Sun in search of comet 67P and untold scientific breakthroughs. This pioneering space probe was launched in early 02004, maneuvered itself into orbit around comet 67p earlier this year, and on November 12 it will be the first human-made craft to make contact with the nucleus of a comet."- The Rosetta Project "Safely preserved beneath the spacecraft's thermal blankets will be the Rosetta Disk, the modern equivalent of the original Rosetta Stone. Micro-etched on this 7.5 cm nickel disk are 1000 different languages, a comprehensive cultural archive gathered by the San Francisco-based Long Now Foundation. Each page of text, which is miniaturized and etched onto the disk as an image, requires only a microscope to be read. Such simplicity guards against the threat of changing technologies, which could make a digital disk unreadable by computers in the future."
I'm starting to notice a pattern. When I say: "It doesn't matter" in re: being disappointed, I am so upset that I am prepared to chew off a leg rather than continue in the trap of having to speak to you.
Haecceity
Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as “thisness”) is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object’s “thisness”, the individualising difference between the concept ‘a man’ and the concept ‘Socrates’ (a specific person).
A favorite colleague just made a joke using the word: “Haecceisstistic”.
Like an apprentice staring at the work of a master, Moist read Reacher Gilt's words on the still-damp newspaper. It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although 'synergistically' had probably been a whore from the start.
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (cited this at work today re: press releases)
synecdochic:
A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).
"Last 2 Speakers of #DyingLanguage Refuse to Talk to Each Other"
love this - so contrary and funny and *human* - like a one sentence short story winner. (also, tickled at Bianca Jagger being RT by a liberal British MP)
amycvdh reblogged
The rather wonderful English word tmesis, which, so far as I know, is the only English word that begins with the letters “tm”. T-M-E-S-I-S; it’s rather wonderful. Which is that … when you cut a word in half by putting another word inside, like saying “abso-blooming-lutely,” or “sen-fucking-sational”.
(via kaishabackwards)
Jamais vu (from the French, meaning "never seen") is the phenomenon of experiencing a situation that one recognizes but that nonetheless seems very unfamiliar. Presque vu (from the French for "almost seen") almost, but not quite, remembering something. This is the "on the tip of my tongue" feeling.
Xu Bing, square word calligraphy A truly amazing artist I worked with in my last job.
[O]ur entire digital world is made up of alphanumeric language (the 1s and 0s of computing). You know sometimes when you receive a JPEG in an email and it comes in wrong, appearing as garbled text instead of an image? It’s a reminder that all of our media now is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words...
How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn’t find a speck of language lurking below the surface. The interesting thing is that now you can open a JPEG in a text editor, dump in a bunch of language, and reopen it as an image, and you’ll find that the image has completely been changed—all as a result of active language. This is so new, and the implications for writing are so profound and paradigmatic.
- The Web's Hidden Language Dave Mandl's interview with Kenneth Goldsmith (via the Daily Dish)