To think about language is to think about what it means to think. That cumbersome sentence makes defensible sense, in fact, because language is the means by which we think. We take up language to say something about our experience in the world. We form subjects and predicates, sentences and paragraphs, and in doing so …
Author Archives: rultimo
Alert and Precise
The English author, poet, and poet laureate Ted Hughes was, as well, a writer of children’s literature, and in the foreword to Children as Writers 2, a collection of prize-winning pieces in a children’s literary competition run in 1975 by the Daily Mirror newspaper, he made some observations which can only help us adults understand …
I’s
I’m not really quite sure how to understand the reasoning behind a new phrasing I’ve heard (but haven’t yet read) a few times now recently. Again just the other day, the host of a podcast said to her guest, By the time your and I’s interview appears, this will be old news. It’s a curious …
You, Not Something Like You
In 1909—well over a century ago now—the English novelist E. M. Forster wrote a short story entitled The Machine Stops, an underground dystopia, a denatured and artificial environment whose inhabitants (can we call them persons any longer?) “mustn’t say anything against the Machine.” One young person does, however, and when over videoconference he asks his …
A Ghost in the Machine?
I heard someone say the other day that he never felt more confident about his writing now that he relied on the assistance of AI, to which a reasonable reply might be that this writer isn’t writing. To feel confident should mean to have faith in one’s own skills, manual or intellectual, and so this …