Sublime

However, when people have a hard time assigning a “meaning” to something they nevertheless produce day in and day out, it’s a clue that we’re on to something in the pragmatic wing of language, where we have to get used to a different sense of what something means—namely, it’s where words do rather than “mean.”

(make us) question long-held notions about language itself. This chapter identifies numerous such inventional sites, including perseveration (rigidity, obsession, and routinization), echolalia (repetition of words and phrases), and self-stimulation.

as the linguist John McWhorter pithily put it, today we ‘talk with our fingers’.

malapropisms and spoonerisms

LLMs deal solely in the probabilistic relations between linguistic tokens.

social networking sites that prompt you to interact with denser ties—people you already know and friends of friends—tend to be less linguistically innovative.

origin. It just happened that the languages diverged. THE ONE-WAY STREET

First, things should disappear more, the way conversations throughout history have naturally not left records.

An individual language is anything that is, or once was, the mother tongue of a group of human beings.