Taking This Writing-Programming Thing Too Far

At a time I really did think you could codify the English language into a formal logic. Hopefully I can be forgiven for being young and impressionable, but it just seemed plausible. I mean, you've got these basic elements of nouns and verbs and participles and they all look like they could make up a basic recipe for defining things. But oh man, does that language take some twists and turns and a million different exceptions to get to something nearing the Queen's English. And then twist that a few hundred more times to get to American English.

I'm sure there was a time of linguistic logic, (Latin?), but ever since it's gotten muddled with slang and euphemism and colloqualisms. And that's actually fine. You could define slang and colloqualisms as a sort of shorthand for linguistic logic. It's when the shorthand forms get reinterpreted as statements on their own, and then those get colloquialized, and that process repeats itself over and over through history that you get to the point that we're at with a million different arbitrary exceptions to learn how to speak.  

Ideally, we would all be switching to a well-tempered language, like Lojban, a Ro, an Esperanto, or even just a modified Globish. Or even more ideally, we would all speak Prolog through lasers from our mouths and be so much more efficient.   But we're still dwindling in the metric system over here so I don't have high hopes that ideal linguistic change will come anytime soon.

—April 17th, 2010

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