knowing... and maybe bit sad

this rooftop sculpture is one of antony gormley's figures from the series Another Place. it has a fanstatically intense, yet completely blank stare, making it a vehicle for whatever pensive attitude the clouds bring with them... another place you might have come across these figures is the long-standing installation at crosby beach, just on the edge of liverpool, where some of the 100 iron men installed along the 3 mile beach have recently been involved in a fantastic act of yarn bombing.
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i've always been intrigued by unmatched pairs of words in language. in this case gormless (deriving from a much older word 'gorm', meaning knowledge or sense), is a shorthand for stupidity in the absence of style, and is tragically bereft of its morphological twin gormful. you'd think gormful would be a pretty positive word - 'knowing' - but the phonological similarity to mournful makes me think its probably more like 'sadness borne of great knowledge'... like finding out that pluto doesn't make the grade, or discovering in advance the manner of your own death, or knowing that you'll never, ever find the other glove...
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and yes. bonus points to anyone who played sculpture bingo right at the start, and twigged to the link between my favourite new word and the sculptor.

geek is a synonym for lonely

some folks mock the elegant simplicity of Roget's Thesaurus 1805 invention as an outmoded form of scholarship. there's a school of computational linguistics which ties his hand-crafted word lists quite concretely to the ways in which the mind organizes language. in particular, network analyses of the interconnected web of concepts captured by this tried-and-tested old work show that it has the same mathematical structure as the thousands upon thousands of 'word associations' provided by hundreds of University of South Florida undergraduates, collected over a period of several years.

in one classy paper, it is shown that these thousands of word-to-word associative relationships can be defined as 'small-world, scale-free' networks, which, like a fractal, have the same structure the deeper and deeper you delve into their detailed complexity: a small number of words are massively hyper-connected to tonnes and tonnes of others, while increasingly small numbers of words are connected to increasingly small numbers of neighbours. the vast majority of words only connect to one other. it it's the same statistical structure as characterizes the links between websites.

so where does good ol' roget fit in all of this? his book of relationships has the same mathematical structure as the random moments of lexical spontaneity provided by generations of university students. good job peter mark, you started something quite special.

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also... there is a game involving dictionaries... but perhaps i should keep that one to myself...

a finial example to us all...

for all of this season's couples... in particular, M+S, T+J, D+D, and L+A. well done all of you, you're certainly doing better than these guys. maybe it's got something to do with this old thing.

still looking forward to S+S later this year, and of course Ch+S coming up sometime soon too!

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oh yes, and a finial in architecture is a decorative knobby thing on a balustrade, or detailed ridge cap on a roof. it's also what you call the twizzly bits at the end of curtain rods, and the flourish at the end of a calligraphic stroke! neat, eh?

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