Pylimitics

Alfred Tennyson is usually referred to as “Alfred, Lord Tennyson”. He was Poet Laureate of England from 1850 to 1892, the longest stretch anyone occupied the position before or since. He wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, which is pretty well known, but not very much of his other work is still read. He… Continue reading

You can get a pretty good idea of the functions of a language by examining its words. This is more than that old saw about “Eskimo having 27 words for ‘snow’.” That was probably apocryphal anyway, but I’m not just talking about nouns. The nouns in a language do, of course, give some insight into… Continue reading

When it’s time to teach children the alphabet, in English it goes like this: you learn the names of the letters, then some words that start with those letters. “Ae,” “bee,” cee,” and so on are what English letters are called, of course. Made-up words that generally don’t mean anything else. Learning the alphabet in… Continue reading

For centuries, one of the most powerful weapons available to anyone was some kind of sword. Swords appeared in various forms in all sorts of cultures, and the skill of using a sword for fighting was developed to quite a high level. You’d think, in all those years and among all those experts, that the… Continue reading