Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.
We’ll talk then.
(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)
Just started reading Neal StephensonWP’s Diamond AgeWP, AM—trembling with excitement. The 500-page, 1995 cyberpunk novel is baroquely immersive in that hip, queer way that only Stephenson can deliver. It has many, many rarefied words too, some of them beautiful («alamodality», «runcible», «velleity1»), some pedantic («cineritious», «hederated», «callypigious»), and some unfathomable (what the hell is «eutactic»?). Of the latter class was «machine-phase»; at first unconsciously ignored (I tend to do that with common-word alloys), it eventually emerged into consciousness and was diligently googled (since unfound on any dictionary I know of)—it is now most definitely a member of the beautiful words class:
It would be a natural goal [of nanotechnology
WP] to be able to put every atom in a selected place (where it would serve as part of some active or structural component) with no extra molecules on the loose to jam the works. Such a system would not be a liquid or gas, as no molecules would move randomly, nor would it be a solid, in which molecules are fixed in place. Instead
this new machine-phase matter would exhibit the molecular movement seen today only in liquids and gases as well as the mechanical strength typically associated with solids. Its volume would be filled with active machinery.
I enjoyed a birriaWP orgy this Sunday at El Chololo, a popular restaurant near ChapalaWP, and just as I was entering the bathroom two brown, impossibly small indian kids were chasing each other out of it. The (slightly) bigger one yelled to his mate: ”Kevin, ‘perame!” (“Kevin, wait for me!”).
I think it was a moment to amber, because surprised as I was of the Irish name having found its way into this beautiful brown boy, beacon of a brown new world, my surprise was really at how Mexican it sounded, how accustomed I had become to hearing such Anglo-Saxon names (Celtic Brian is very popular too) in young Mexican children.
Wrote this eons ago but I just found it yesterday. Got a sudden urge to do some minor tweaking and re-show it to the world. I know it’s oversimplified and naive but I still find it interesting to play with.
There are also some interesting thoughts on the intersection (and contrast) of art, design, decoration, and advertising on A List Apart’s The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes writeup.
“Your drink.” The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle.
That’s your run-of-the-mill —even white-bread (blue liquid… how intriguing)— kind of paragraph, ne? I thought so too but then there was that word,
felch, v
trans. Usually of a male homosexual: to stimulate the anus of (a sexual partner) orally; spec. to remove orally semen ejaculated into the anus of (a partner). Also: to insert a small animal, esp. a gerbil, into the anus of (a partner) for sexual stimulation.
Oxford English Dictionary, Draft Entry, Mar. 2003
and it casts the whole scene into a wholly different light, doesn’t it? It wasn’t evident at first but that’s not the omniscient narrator speaking—it’s our lovingly perverted BDSM geek protagonist, Manny, painting the world with his colors.
And that’s what I mean when I say Accelerando is dense: it is chock-full of such all-important words. Since they are generally very technical or speculative, and since Stross has the habit of studding them like raisins into any given sentence, you’ll be tempted to just skip over them. Don’t.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I
am American! I’ve been
devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
