I'm Not Very Good With Words

Having a large active vocabulary (which maybe Gary Barlow felt he didn't) makes it easier to express yourself, but it doesn't solve the problem altogether.

I disagree. Our language is endless. People's vocabularies and mental libraries of stock word-combinations are limited.

What?

they just do.

"I have trouble with words" usually = "I can't be bothered to explain my amazingly complex thoughts to you but just accept that they're really fascinating". I fuckin' HATE self-deprecators

no, that's bullshit. it's more like "i have thoughts i want to express verbally but am unable to, and it is FUCKING FRUSTRATING."

i wish i could explain it better, but i cannot. *shrug*

Thoughts don't tend to come in grammatical sentences, Mark. I would have thought that was obvious.

see? i wanted to say that, but couldn't.

A sentence which I remember Marcello quoting as an example of something said by soap opera characters which he had never encountered in real life. It is a puzzling sentence....if it *was* obvious, then the person would never have had to say *that* in the first place!

I tend to think in grammatical sentences, too. Is N. attempting to refute Chomsky, who believes that we all have a universal grammar, regardless of the culture into which we are born, which is "hard wired" into our brains in some way?

For me, the limiter is not so much whether what I say will be arranged in an ordered grammatical way, as a concern that what I say may be considered offensive or ludicrous by those listening. Of course, a perfectly grammatical sentence may be either or both of those.

"It is endless"
I disagree. try to really explain a color or a feeling.
"What is love?" you could allude to it with poetry, but you can't outright and capture. Not everything is a word. I think I kind of see them as limitin, that's why I like music and painting more than writing. These are forms of conveying things that words can't (emotional, aural, visual)

.......pauses.

I'm not talking about grammar!! "The right combination of words" != "the correct combination" (or whatever).

(and yes, language is infinite because these combinations of words are infinite, and language is more than just individual words. this is what i'm trying to say.)

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

Haha the ironing is delicious.

(you think in grammatical sentences = bollocks)

But works of art are imperfect, since we can never really know the author's intent. They're as open to (mis)interpretation as language is.

It's the other way around, isn't it? Love is an attempt to capture poetry.

You're wrong. It's BRILLIANT at capturing experience. It depends on the writer.

My gripe with that argument is that the promise of infinite combinations/contextualizations doesn't seem to alter the limitations of the fundamental type of work that language does. To rightly call it endless (or at least to argue against it being limiting), I think you'd have to be able to prove that it has the potential to operate on the same intangible terms as other art. If you concede that words can't do those things, then in the words of the immortal Chris Morris: "Limits."

Hey, communication is a two-way street, bro. Pay better attention next time.

All writing is merely approximation of experience; no writer can perfectly duplicate it.

So what? It's language. It's endless in the capacity of what it does as language. Language can't iron sweaters, but that's not what language does.

I think you'd have to be able to prove that it has the potential to operate on the same intangible terms as other art.

Again, language is descriptive; being intangible is just not the function of language. But yes, the sounds of spoken language and the visuals of letters on page can be very pretty as objets d'art.

So is a photograph.

By that logic, everything is endless.

I disagree. Our language is endless. People's vocabularies and mental libraries of stock word-combinations are limited.

-- Jody Beth Rosen (edito...), February 26th, 2003 4:49 AM. (later) (Jody Beth Rosen) (link)

Haha I think had Archel said 'limited' this thread might not have happened at all.

"Here" meaning "w/r/t language and infinity."

I originally said language was 'limiting'. Maybe that sounded too pejorative, but really it just means exactly that - there are things that language doesn't do.

Apparently one of them is allowing extremely articulate people to make sense to each other :)

Far beyond 'very well'
Well, that's not at issue. There are great writers who can do great things and there may be more in the future doing things we can't even imagine. Yay!

g. you are right: grammar = glamour = gramyrie => it's all abt the right way of casting a hex (it works) vs the wrong (it doesn't)

now i am going to extend my theory thus:

grammar = glamour = granular = gramyrie

Then yore BRANE BREAKS. I want to do philosophy of maths too!

Well I've been wasting my time with this poetry crap, then.

but paul, the universe won't go on forever!! it is bounded timewise!! hence any set within it (= all experience that will ever actually happen) is bounded too, hence non-infinite!!

Bounded != finite. There are an infinite number of rational numbers between 1 and 2.

I brought it up, so it is at issue. :-)

I'm not very good with words. (And it all comes back around.)

That's why I like it!

(ps what is this thread about? I'm not so good at reading long threads)

(otherwise we'd get stuck, like a CD skipping)

It all makes sense.

glendower: i can call forth savants from the vasty deep!!
henry: so can i, and so can any man, but do they come when you do call?

It is? What is the shortest possible unit of time? Are you making some mind-body assertion about the propagation speed of electrochemical impulses in the brain?

Or no, wait, now you say "we'd get stuck"? CD data is granular; the mind is not (as far as I know). Do you believe in some mental persistence-of-vision-type effect that causes the illusion of a smoothly moving experience? Have you read de Selby on this topic??

Anyway, the universe is infinite regardless of time bounds.

I've been wasting my time with this poetry crap

You are trying to precisely emulate the effect of heard music, Chris? Poetry can do so much more than that!

I am leaving the house now, so please feel free to refute and/or misunderstand my points in my absence. Especially the carrot cake one.

Some of us seem to be saying that language doesn't even have the power to fully (and accurately) re-create our own experience to ourselves; others seem to assume that this IS possible and that its power falls down when it rubs up against that hoary old beast known as 'interpretation'.

At first I was going to say "no", but actually: Yes, I am trying to get out of language (or, rather, the materials of language often extracted from their "language" aspects, if that makes any sense) the same types of "psycho-acoustic" effects that you describe getting out of music.

Poetry can do so much more than that!

Music can do more than what you described, too.

but if such a situation never arises what does it mean to say this? the unit has no existential use: still less HALF this unit?

it's a phantom of induction!!

Giles: "It's an infinity demon. Very Very clever and persistent. Easy to call up, seems to be very helpful, but gradually you find yrserlf more and more confused and disorientated."
Buffy: "So is it with the sharp stakiness?"
*Giles is looking hard at something some millimeters away from the end of the stake*

It hardly matters what our lowest limit of discrimination is. Even if the fastest I could have a thought (come up with a new word or sentence, say) takes [whatever fraction of a second], it's not as if the 6 billion people on this planet are ticking along the same time atoms, you know? Even if we can't interpret anything happening faster than a nanosecond (or whatever), that doesn't mean that time ticks along in one-nanosecond increments.

Your argument seems to privilege experience over theory, but you're using it to prove a theoretical point. We're not talking about the number of setences that will be made, we're talking about the number of sentences that could be made.

(Dammit, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet.)

OK, suppose you are correct in insisting on the necessary and relevant existence of human experiences billions of times briefer than – say — 24 frames a second, how many (human) sentences get formed which take a billonth of a second to express?

if there's a lower limit to the time it takes to say a sentence (which there is, even if it wd be silly to make claims what it is, given the smartarses infesting ilx), and time is bounded, then the number of sentences which will ever be said is finite, the number of things and acts and experiences that will occur is finite, and so – yes a much much larger number possibly — the number of sentences which COULD be made is finite

the fact that we define time as being endlessly divisible for computational convenience in ordinary newtonian mathematics — or that a line is an infinite gathering of infinitesimals, subject to certain properties — tells us nothing about the nature of the world below a certain level of magnification

to make the point paul or jody want to make, we don't need to fuck with the infinite: very large — practically speaking, uncountably large — numbers are quite enough

From where I sit, it sounds like you're creating the complicated theory of smallest-divisible-unit-of-time, whereas it seems much simpler and much more reasonable to have time be infinitely divisible. Especially since no actual time-atoms (nor, as far as I know, any scientific reason why they should exist) have been found.

But: It's true that their argument works just as well if the number of possible sentences is ridiculously huge as well, so this is all moot, I guess.

(obvious victim of occam's razor here: chris and paul are correct in saying that i didn't actually need to look into the question of time's lower boundedness, in ref the original argt, bcz sentences are lower-bounded in time)

How d'you know time is bounded? We presume it is at beginning, but aren't too sure about later on. Infinity at one end only is still infinity. Or do you have satchels full of dark matter and stuff, and know a cool secret?