{"id":4,"date":"2005-01-11T19:12:28","date_gmt":"2005-01-11T23:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/01\/11\/something-about-language\/"},"modified":"2005-01-11T19:12:28","modified_gmt":"2005-01-11T23:12:28","slug":"something-about-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/01\/11\/something-about-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Something about language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a1709'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Nope, it&#8217;s gone.  Driving back from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uvic.ca\/\">UVic<\/a> tonight, after choir drop-off for one of the offspring, I had a moment of clarity about language, about <i>why<\/i> it&#8217;s our first technology.  <i>But then I lost it.<\/i>  By the time the CD track changed from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/redirect?tag=declarus-20&amp;path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2FB0001WAO5S%2Fqid%3D1105497158%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dmusic\">Slipping below the water line<\/a> (which I love because, among other things, it <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/stories\/storyReader$1384\">provided succor<\/a> during an attack of hate mail) to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/redirect?tag=declarus-20&amp;path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2FB0001WAO5S%2Fqid%3D1105497158%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dmusic\">The world is full of crashing bores<\/a>, it was gone.  I was thinking of my brainstorm of several days ago, which (although I intended to keep this to myself) entailed my return to sculpture: I had this total brainstorm about a new series of 3-d work.  (I used to be a sculptor, eh, just like I used to be an art historian.)  Sculpture: not exactly a language technology, right?  Or is it?  And driving down the black and rainy streets from the heights of UVic to the knobs of Rockland, I had this <i>picture<\/i> (worth a thousand words?) of why language <b>is<\/b> a technology, even though we generally don&#8217;t treat it as one, preferring to slut and rut our way instead with tarted up gadgets and powerfully virile machines we think we understand.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine if we actually managed to understand our (technological) proficiency in &#8230;language.  Poets would make out like bandits &#8212; finally; and then bandits would be saints.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nope, it&#8217;s gone. Driving back from UVic tonight, after choir drop-off for one of the offspring, I had a moment of clarity about language, about why it&#8217;s our first technology. But then I lost it. By the time the CD track changed from Slipping below the water line (which I love because, among other things, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}