To remain vital, language needs to reinvent itself, daily. If a language begins to lose its capacity to express what people want to communicate it either reinvents itself or it becomes a dead language. It’s a Darwinian thing: Adapt or perish.
Even if we take particular care to communicate what we fully intended – picking our way through the maze of our minds to find the right words – we have no control over the chaotic mass that may be the receiver’s brain, and so we are left in doubt whether the received message was actually understood as intended.
Incentivize suggests something more insidious than mere pursuit of a desired thing or outcome, it connotes an action intended to serve the interests of the person offering the incentive, not just the person being incented.
Gamification in video games is not unlike gambling: the thrill of a ‘win’, the gradual habituation of the dopamine hit, the constant enticements for ‘just one more round’.
submitting our writing to the critical gaze of a heartless public takes fearlessness beyond courage. It takes drink.
The apostrophe signals to the reader that expected letters have been left out (but not forgotten): I suppose when people began to take on names, Gronk didn’t need to say, ‘that stick hims’, he said, ‘that stick Jons’ and later it became ‘that’s Jon’s stick’ with that Johnny-come-lately apostrophe stuck in the middle. But what did he say about Gus?
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