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Re: SemiOT: Revealing your conlanger status, personal experiences of reaction...

From:<jcowan@...>
Date:Friday, June 18, 2004, 18:17
Sally Caves scripsit:

> (Ever try to describe to a doctor what it feels like for > everything to be "going slow"? It's as if I've said to him, it feels as if > the world domai fan. He's gobsmacked. He trots out the words > "depersonalization" and "anxiety." How does that help me?)
Oliver Sacks describes a disorder (I forget its name) in which patients lose their sense of leftness. Nothing that happens on their left side is perceived; indeed, it seems to them that nothing could possibly happen there.
> We can't get inside someone's head; public language is an imperfect > communicator, and for W. it is the only communicator.
It took a moment to realize that by "W." you meant Wittgenstein; I first took it to be George W. Bush's nickname. For that W., public language is indeed an imperfect communicator. -- John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com The penguin geeks is happy / As under the waves they lark The closed-source geeks ain't happy / They sad cause they in the dark But geeks in the dark is lucky / They in for a worser treat One day when the Borg go belly-up / Guess who wind up on the street.