Language Log

According to Claude Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Bell System Technical Journal 1948:

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer  to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic  aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual  message is one selected from a set of possible messages.

Rather than abstracting away from the fact that communicated messages may have meaning, this recent xkcd strip explores the idea that the "message selected at another point" may have little or no impact on the message that is received:

Panels two and three (of six) from David Malki's most recent Illustrated Jocularity, "The Wish of the Starhorse":

Today's Zits:

Today's xkcd:

Yesterday's Partially Clips:

The current strip over at Dinosaur Comics starts with these two panels:

And Ryan's note (in the "What are the haps my friends" section below the strip) says

T-Rex's sentence in the first panel is a snowclone! There's a bunch of them here on Language Log, which is also just about where the word originated! NOW YOU KNOW

To guard against the inevitable internet bit-rot, the whole strip is here.

The latest installment of Ruben Bolling's political cartoon "Tom the Dancing Bug" takes the form of a satirical information sheet, "So… You've Been Indefinitely Detained!" Among the "Frequently Asked Questions, Which You'll Have Plenty of Time to Contemplate," is this one:

Q. Have I been disappeared?
A. People aren't "disappeared" in America! Only in lawless dictatorships can intransitive verbs be used to make passive forms.

Dilbert for 12/17/2011 suggests that we may be in more danger from smartphone apps than from autonomous warbots — not Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, but Rowan Atkinson as the Administrator:

Today's installment of John Allison's web-comic short story "Murder She Writes" features the youthful amateur detective Charlotte Grote ("Lottie") using well as an intensifier of the adjective brutal.

This is a traditional usage — the OED's sense 16.a. for well, "With adjectives. Formerly in common use, the sense varying from ‘fully, completely’ to ‘fairly, considerably, rather’", has citations going back to the 9th century:

c888 Ælfred tr. Boethius De Consol. Philos. xxv,   Seo leo, þeah hio wel tam se,‥heo forgit sona hire niwan taman.
c900 tr. Bede Eccl. Hist. iv. ii. 258   Wæron her stronge cyningas and wel cristene.

But now well ADJ is rare except in the cases listed in sense 16.b. "In modern use esp. in well able, well aware, well worth, well worthy", a list that obviously doesn't include "well brutal". (Well is freely used as a modifier on past participles, as in "a well-cooked egg", but that's another matter.)

In the current Penny & Aggie strip, Lisa continues to enjoy her first linguistics lecture. She's entranced by the International Phonetic Alphabet, which hits her like the green-screen "digital rain" from The Matrix:

According to recent Penny & Aggie strips (here and here), this can be the effect of a single linguistics-class lecture:

BEFORE	AFTER

Today's Non Sequitur:

In the most recent Penny & Aggie, needing an apparently random choice of college class to play a role in an undergraduate interaction, the author chose "Linguistics":

This presupposes that linguistics courses are a normal part of the college landscape, which would certainly be a step forward.