Excalibur's New Writeups

An Open Letter to the Democratic National Committee (idea)

2008-03-07T03:59:32Z

An open letter to the Democratic National Committee and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm:

I am a citizen of the great state of Michigan and a member of the Democratic Party. During my lifetime I have never failed to vote for a Democratic candidate in a national election — not because of simple party loyalty, but because I believe the Democrats and I share the same progressive values and moral principles.

Like many of my fellow young Democrats, I have been more enthralled by this election than by any other I can remember. Not only is it exciting to watch a tight race between two very skilled politicians, but it is thrilling to find a candidate with the integrity, intelligence, charisma, and broad appeal of Senator Barack Obama. Even so, if…

atomic bomb (thing)

2007-04-07T10:02:34Z

"The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined."
- Brigadier General T.F. Farrell's official report on the Trinity test

On July 16, 1945, at 5:30 in the morning local time, the first atomic bomb in history was detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was witnessed by high military officials and the scientists who had built it; J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the efforts, famously thought of a line from Hindu scripture: I am become Death, the…

Gricean maxims (idea)

2007-03-21T05:56:41Z

What would you think if I said to you, "You are going to die"? Would you look at me funny for stating the obvious? After all, what's the point in informing you of something you already know? Every one of us is going to die. Clearly there's no point in telling you about it, right?

Of course not. You'd take it as a threat. Why? Because you know I'm not likely to remark upon your mortality for no reason, so you'd think a little harder. And you'd figure out that was suggesting that your death was going to be a bit earlier than you had planned on.

There's a natural process in conversation in which we assume that what a person says is relevant and useful, and when it seems not to be on the surface, we dig into it a little further to figure out what they could be getting at. Paul Grice was a British philosopher of language who looked at the natural assumptions used in conversations, and he developed the…

And Mother burst forth, green and beautiful (fiction)

2007-03-19T04:11:05Z

Linda had been beautiful once. Now she was middle-aged, now she was grey-haired, now she was growing wrinkles shaped by the sneers and frowns she had worn all her life. But she was beautiful once, ice-blue eyes and black hair and slim body and most of all a face that lied. It was a face that looked sweet, and warm, and kind, even though she had none of these qualities. The truth emerged in the end, though, and her face grew to match what she was inside. It was ugly, and Linda was alone.

When she was young, she had dated men, slept with them, and accepted gifts from them until she grew tired of them, and then she found new ones to replace the worn out models. Her rages were legendary,…

prescriptivism and descriptivism (essay)

2007-03-11T03:48:25Z

A recent writeup provoked three users to send me a certain message. I expected this, actually. I've gotten this before when telling people that I study linguistics or yammering on about some little grammatical oddity that's probably far less interesting to whoever I'm talking to than it is to me. The message is this: the person tells me that they're impressed by my knowledge of grammar, which they seem to regard as a particularly arcane area of knowledge, and then they make a self-deprecating comment about their own ability with language. "Ha ha, I better watch my mouth around you," they say. "I was never any good at that stuff," they confide. "The way I talk must make you cringe," they tell me. Well, I wasn't cringing before, but I sure am now.

A minor wave of pique passes through me when I hear this. It's a bit of an insult — I didn't study this subject in order to get better at tsk-tsking at others' "misuse" of language. It also makes me feel a bit sad…

Conservapedia (thing)

2007-03-07T06:16:37Z

"A conservative encyclopedia you can trust."

E2 has some new competition in the collaborative database department! Conservapedia is here offering the denizens of the internet a new source of information, one that's not contaminated with neutrality or objectivity! It has over 3,800 articles! And all of those articles offer a conservative, pro-American, pro-Jesus take on their subject matter.

"Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. . . . You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of 'political correctness'."

Stephen Colbert famously said that "reality has a well-known liberal bias", and the American political right does not shy away from freeing itself of that bias, with news sources like Fox News and political gambits like…