“formist”

“Si lo nuestro va a funcionar…”

Translate that!

Si, probablemente “If our relationship is gonna work out…” sea una traduccion satisfactoria pero lo que yo busco es una traduccion en la que “relationship” vaya implicita, no solo por cobarde sino porque siento que “lo nuestro” habla de algo mas intimo, mas sutil.

Have you ever chanced upon someone’s blog only to suddenly fall in love and realize here was someone so similar to yourself (only dazzingly more brilliant) with whom you’re bound to cross paths sooner or later? I have. Today. Twice. Here and here.

1. A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
2. A form is a linguistic pattern.
3. A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
4. Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
5. It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
6. Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
7. Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
8. Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
9. Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
   Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.

   I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
10. Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
11. Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
12. Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
13. Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.

14. We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.

    [...]

    A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.

    The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine)
15. Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.

    What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?

    “Make me one with everything.”

    * * *
    
    When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”

    Formists just want to have fun.

16. A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
17. Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
18. Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
19. Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
20. Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
21. A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugar^WP .”
22. It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
23. This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
24. All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.

    Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!

    Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]

    Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain
25. Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.

How would you say “unos novios comiendose a besos” in English? What’s the English phrase for “comiendose a besos”? Do you realize there’s no ready equivalent of “novios” in English? There’s “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” but no “novios” (a word for a gf and her bf). Couple is probably the best ersatz but there are subtle differences. “Couple” hints of a more formal, older-people affair than “novios.” It’d feel strange to call two tweens in love a couple, but it’d be perfectly normal to call them “novios.” If I were to announce that “Bere y yo ya somos novios” I wouldn’t use the stiff and over-formal “Bere and me are now a couple”, I’d say “Bere and me are now officially a couple.” Now, in what dictionary do you find that officially is often used to de-emphasize formality?

...es el titulo de una cancion de Miguel Gallardo. La cancion es buena pero a mi lo que me encanta es el titulo. Es mi eleccion para ristra de 5 palabras mas romantica (y cachonda) de la lengua Española. En Frances, mi delfin es aquel inovidable (y fatalmente ironico) Je veux baiser votre âne! de Vince Cassel a Monica Bellucci en Irréversible (al que ella responde, sonriendo y tambien con 5 palabras, Tu es un tel romantique!)

Aunque ahora que lo pienso, siendo el campo de juego ristras (y no solo frases), preferiria: lima, axila, cadera, media-mañana y pupila.

En que cosas divago… supongo que yo tambien ando en busca de una amitié amoureuse.

Just ‘cause, how the fuck does one translate this (wonderful) sentence to Spanish?

(This is just me loud thinking, it has nothing to do with On the language of this blog.)

March 2, 2006 – Update:

Que tal?

That’s the chilling intro to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Honestly, when I first read it I thought it was mere Engrish, but now that I’ve come to terms with its form (I’m even starting to like it), I can’t get its content out of my head. It’s just so powerful.

It makes you think of civilization as one long gradient towards ever larger complexes. A very interesting lens with which to revisit many important events and inventions: family, clans, money, speaking, writing, printing, law, contracts, corporations, science, the net, IP, blogs, wiki, mailing lists, email, IM, whatnot.

And it reminds me a lot of a favorite essay of mine—one I stumbled across a few years ago in wonderful serendipity: Erosion of the Essential Self. In it, it is argued that our sense of self is being made increasingly obsolete by technology, and that this may not necessarily be a bad thing. One of the interesting points it makes is that our sense of self itself is probably a byproduct of written culture: “In ongoing, face-to-face conversation, we are little concerned with the mind behind the words; meaning is shaped before us in the course of the interchange. However, with the emergence of printed text, important questions were created about the ‘author’s meaning.’” It’s one of those essays that simply becomes a part of you afterwards, something like this: