One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying
The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age
.. “In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has come to an end, and none will have a full stop,” he added “So why use it?”
.. Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, whose books include “Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation,” the period is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, syntactic snark, insincerity, even aggression
If the love of your life just canceled the candlelit, six-course, home-cooked dinner you have prepared, you are best advised to include a period when you respond “Fine.” to show annoyance
.. “The period now has an emotional charge and has become an emoticon of sorts
.. Those text message with periods were rated as less sincere, the study found, whereas it made no difference in the notes penned by hand
.. “It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” he said “It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going – period’ It’s a mark It can be aggressive It can be emphatic It can mean, ‘I have no more to say’
The Consequences of Calling Trump a Fascist Become Clear in San Jose
If you dub Trump ‘Hitler,’ can you be surprised when people oppose him with violence?
.. To many, Trump’s strongman tactics, his insistence on making attendees at his rallies swear oaths to him, and his apparent disregard for the separation of powers and rule of law, reek of the demons of the 20th century. Many see in Trump — and the new class of Eastern European autocrats whom he, in many ways, resembles — shades of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco.
.. it’s not hard to see why so many thinkers view Trump as a fascist threat, given his willingness to use violence to further his own goals. Assaults on protesters at his rallies are all too common, and they’re often egged on by Trump himself, standing at the podium.
.. So if Donald Trump is a fascist, what is to be done?
.. In reality, the opposite has happened. Political violence has arisen not from the right, but from the left.
.. The term “fascist” is a very, very powerful thing. Its powers extend far beyond those exerted by the words “racist” or “misogynist” or “xenophobic,” for fascists threaten not merely a specific race or sex but rather the entire polity. If pundits are to use it to describe Trump and his movement, they must be prepared to live with the consequences.
How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures
As the theorist Walter J Ong pointed out in Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word (1982), it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, now to imagine how differently language would have been experienced in a culture of ‘primary orality’. There would be nowhere to ‘look up a word’, no authoritative source telling us the shape the word ‘actually’ takes.
.. In the absence of fixed, textual anchors for words, there would be a sharp sense that language is charged with power, almost magic: the idea that words, when spoken, can bring about new states of affairs in the world. They do not so much describe, as invoke.
.. Writing rapidly turned customs into laws, agreements into contracts, genealogical lore into history. In each case, what had once been fundamentally temporal and singular was transformed into something eternal (as in, ‘outside of time’) and general.
.. The freezing in text of dialectical reasoning, with a heavy admixture (however impure or problematic) of poetry, aphorism and myth, became the model for what, in the European tradition, was thought of as ‘philosophy’ for the next few millennia.
.. Within academic philosophy today, there is significant concern arising from how to make philosophy more ‘inclusive’ ..
.. As it happens, there are few members of primary oral cultures left in the world. And yet from a historical perspective the great bulk of human experience resides with them.
What’s a good single-word term to describe a user who’s signed in to your website?
A Member is someone who’s registered to your service, but not necessarily logged into the application/site.
A Guest is someone who uses your services without being registered or logged in.
User is too broad of a term, in my opinion. A user can be anyone, whether he or she is a member or guest. Basically, anyone who uses the application.
Authenticated User or Authenticated Member is closest to what I’m searching for, but I’m still holding out for a shorter term.