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.
If you have been taught how to read and write, you probably learned the distinction between where from wear. Somewhere along the line – Grade Six maybe – you were even taught about homophones, (along with homonyms, synonyms and antonyms), and to take care not to mistake them. These were challenging concepts, but to 11-year-old boys homophones (and homonyms) were especially noteworthy.
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.
There are many ways we northerners, hungering for warmer weather, have to forecast Spring. All these prophesy mechanisms may be flawed, even my misplaced faith in Wiarton Willi. But for me the surest sign we have of impending Spring is the switch to Daylight Saving Time.
On Christmas Eve morning, at about 10:30, Brian said he was going for a drive. I said that his son and family were coming for lunch at 11:00 and asked that he not go. To no avail, Brian didn’t want to have anything to do with Christmas and he wanted to leave.
He was gone for 27 hours.
Writing well is hard enough, but to write something funny is seriously difficult. Indeed, much of the humour we see on paper is mostly cartoon-assisted text. And even much of that will depend on the mind of the reader
As we readied to leave the doctor’s office, Doc held me back and told me to hide the car keys. This was singularly unhelpful advice but for the sake of our, and community safety, I hid the keys, even disabled the spare key.
OH MY FREAKIN’ ANCESTORS !! My wonderful man turned into Angry Bird.
Writing the blog twice a month takes real effort, and the pressure of a deadline (each 15th and 30th of the month) becomes somewhat stressful (oscillating between eustress and dystress)
AFS Publishing
djordan@afspublishing.ca
613 591-2332
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