ClockQuotes

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and the rain with verbs, and for worms to pass through question marks, and the stars to shine down on budding nouns, and the dew to form on paragraphs.

- Richard Brautigan

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Think of celery, an airplane or a dog. Each of these words, along with the thousands of others in the English language, create a different and unique pattern of activity in your brain. Now, a team of scientists has developed the first computer programme that can predict these patterns for concrete…
Blogs and the mainstream media have been filled with neuroscience news lately. First we learned that sarcasm happens in the brain, and then that sexual orientation is in the brain too. There was even an attempt (sarcastic, I hope) to account for sports fandom with mirror neurons (I've heard that…
Language Log details the results of this fascinating experiment. The researcher was looking at second language acquisition, and in order to have a control she tested the native-speakers on the gender of particular words in French. The assumption would be the native-speakers would all agree on the…
Shakespeare bent language in peculiar ways. He had a habit of violating our conventional grammatical categories, so that nouns became verbs and adjectives were turned into nouns. (This is known as a functional shift.) Here's Phillip Davis: Thus in "Lear" for example, Edgar comparing himself to the…