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Tag Archives: eavesdropping

Overheard in the coffee room

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

A bunch of philosophy students are having a thesis review session. “Sorry, did you say it was about Taoism or Terrorism?”

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Semanticists at lunch

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Studying semantics doesn’t give you much to laugh at, most of the time. In fact, rather the reverse: being too aware of what words mean, you start to miss what people mean when they say them. Anyone confronted with “Oh, it’s funny because…” has probably just told a joke to a semanticist. But there are [...]

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Referencing by association

Saturday, April 22, 2006

From a talk I attended recently (slightly paraphrased, I was slow off the mark writing the quote down):

> Orson Welles, > Brave New World, anybody read that > book? They have a ministry redefining language so that people can’t talk about political > concepts like going to war.

I was slow off the mark because I was having difficulty [...]

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