ephemeralchemex

language is weird and swearing is maybe the weirdest thing we do with it! oh most words are fine avocado sasketch one amphibian dog entity but use these otherwords and suddenly it’s all uh sir this is a funeral that’s not appropriate language also why are you wearing that dinosaur costume also please stop openly taking schedule 1 substances during the reading of the eulogy ,jesus we may as well start with perhaps the ultimate naughty mouth noise which we’ll just substitute with the german philosopher kant ,the words cunt roots are probably germanic we don’t know how the word got started but we do know that the strength of the word has changed over time chaucer used a cousin word quaint .openly in the 14th century shakespeare was writing puns with it in the 17th century and today like many swears it functions as the lowest insult and at the same time the highest compliment in many parts of the world one might be called a stupid cunt but in australia he’s a right good cunt is tall praise indeed same goes for he’s the shit just remove the, definite article and the meaning is exactly the opposite like wise bollocks can mean false information or the dog’s bollocks something brilliant then there’s fuck the beloved old faithful of the english tongue it probably comesfrom germanic or indo-european possibly for to strike and it is flexible it can function as an adjective, is that a funckin penguin as an adverb this penguin is fucking unhinged yo !intransitive verb this penguin fucks or even as a verbal noun that penguin has an assault rifle i think we’re about to receive quite the fucking and judging by the fact that official documents from the middle ages mention gentlemen with names such as the upstanding john le fucker we can guess that like the word cunt probably wasn’t always as strong as it is today anyway words don’t just change in severity but they also mutate to be nice once meant to be foolish to amuse meant to deceive then there’s toilet a noun borrowed from the middle french word toilte meaning a littlepiece of cloth next it came to mean the cloth that covers a dressing table ,then the things on the dressing table then the dressing table itself then the wholeprocess of getting ready for the day and then morphed into its current form the disgustatorium we know and love in any case cursing and insults probably work not because of the sound of the words themselves but because they are metaphors if you screw up and the serbian person tells you you just fucked the hedgehogs back! it's clearly not that you literally crippled a poor hedgehog but that you are in general regrettably an idiot likewise in latin calling someone a public poop pile clearly justmeant they were worthless or in russian if someone threatens you with me I’m gonna show you where the crayfish hibernates really of course they just mean actually i have no idea with this one but sounds good doesn’t it and some languages don’t even really have profanity but the one we’re speaking in ,now does it is a technology it is a gift because the real genius of our speciesis in language and the genius of language is in cursing and it’s more complicated than that because to even get that some words are bad in the first place you have to understand register phonology semantics all of which we’re doing all day every day automatically right now in fact meaning get a load of you 10 out of 10 no notes you’re a linguistic primate whatever happens even if everything’s gone to shit, even if you’re miserably reading to this instead of doing your homeowork because you ran out of motivation , you have the superpower of language meaning… if you’re reading this then congratulations you’ve already acquired a language, but of course none of us remember doing it really new humans usually spend a large amount oftheir time vocalizing meaninglessnonsense some people continue this farpast infancy it’s called babbling, even fresh out of the oven we’re alreadytrying to talk then between 9 and 18 months usually come our first words inenglish generally mama dada or oh god iexist make it stop by year two most ofus have at least 150 words licked and bythree we will simply not shut up thenmost of us will go on to nail the fourmain aspects of wordy noises phonology that’s the sound of speech semanticsthat’s vocabulary and meaning grammar and syntax learning how words fittogether and pragmatics knowing what’seven appropriate to say and when andjust as children acquire language presumably civilization had to too .too what please permit this stock image of a confused llama to signify we don’t know so did language first begin in our hunter-gatherer past as just simple nouns and what was the first language well ,tamil is the oldest living language thousands of years old even and still spoken by about 80 million people today but again bruh and did an enlargening of the human brain make language possible or did language encourage enlargements of the brain evolution is sociopathic but it isn’t usually wasteful so what problem did ourdistant ancestors have to solve that wasso complicated we had to evolve not justsimple verbal communication but thecapacity to memorize and use thousandsand thousands of words why did our ancestors need the ability to say, uh homies i don’t mean to be egregious but is that a rather sizable apex predator over there? rather than just ah fucK! lion FUCK! maybe it was for negotiation maybe for laying down sick diss tracks we have no idea then again we don’t even know where we yawn yet so you know baby steps still if we stick with english for now we do know a fair bit just like greek hindi catalan and many other languages english has its roots in proto-indo-europeana language we’ve had to reconstruct probably spoken about 6 000 years ago bya bunch of cats who lived between the black sea and the caspian sea through a combination of the standard human pastimes of wandering around and shagging each other language families probably grew out of proto-indo-europeangermanic began to evolve then cameanglo-frisian old english middle english and finally the patchwork tongue we’re using now and just 10 seconds of watching what you’re saying in English will reveal what a patchwork tongue it is do you like waffles what is do doing there exactly you like waffles or i know like waffles is not only more efficient it’s the structure plenty of other languages use perfectly well or o-u-g-h which can be used simultaneously to spell do cough bough through and if you’re learning english at the moment i’m just so sorry we don’t get it either in fact english is one of the only languages that can have competitions for spelling many languages can’t do this it’s too easy because they use phonetic spelling because they’re not fuckign mental ! yukt…descent, choreograph, english stop it getsome help and it’s kinda telling thatonce indoctrinated into english is madness! if someone breaks the rules we know even if we can’t explain what the rule is this sentence now become loads weird ,syntax because all jumbled or the fact that in English descriptions generally have to go , opinion, size, age shape ,color, origin ,material ,purpose, noun and only in that order or we get upset a lovely big new blue fluffy polyester cat bed is fine apolyester blue cat bed lovely big new fluffy strongly suggests those thc gummies have just kicked in hard or register which is basically knowing which words to use in the context of communicating there are a few registers in english but let’s just say we’re usually talking formally or informally and it’s not always obvious which register to use you may have found yourself in one of those stupid interviews with a, hey we’re all friends at the company vibe where they insist you speak your mind and just be honest but if they ask what you do for fun and as requested you reply ..honestly well in my free time i like smoking massive rocks of crack cocaine ,i’d say my biggest weakness isperfectionism it is highly unlikely you will be offered the position but arguably the most interesting feature ofalmost all languages is displacement orrather we can talk about things somewhere else in time and space none of us will live to see it but we can have a chat about paris in 500 years or patagonia 500 years ago likewise you’re not here but i can tell you it’s currently 1am on earth and i’m sat in front of two monitors with a word document and a beer the cat is sleeping on the deskthe light is fairly dim and you probably imagined something like this which doesn’t sound like a remarkable skill but it is it’s literally telepathy it’s mind-reading because language isn’t just for pointing it is the ether in which we distribute abstractions it’s possible without words even there’s no official name for an ellipsis followed by a question mark(…?) but the meaning is universally understood as, uh what the shit?? and the fact that we immediately get this tells us that humans have evolved way past the era of pointing andentered into the age of signification and metaphor things mean deeper things sometimes was captain oates just goingfor a walk was moby dick just about awhale are those baby on board signs justabout the baby on board and if you happen to be the sort of person wholikes to blow off a little steam byindiscriminately careening into othermotor vehicles at top speed but yousuddenly notice this sign would you avoid that car for some reason or is the purpose of the sign really just to tell you that the people driving the car successfully boned at least once ? we getit you reproduced well done etc etc etc messier 13. it’s a fairly cramped globular galaxy about 25,000 light years away and in 1974 we detectedthis signal coming from messier 13. the signal is composed of frequency modulated radio waves shifting by 10 hertz and out of this you get ones and zeros that correspond to 1679 digits which is weird because that’s a semi-prime a number divisible by itself one and two other prime numbers 23 and 73. so you arrange the ones and zeros on a grid 23 by 73 squares and you get these shapes it’shard to imagine this is from a natural astronomical event but if it’s a message it’s even harder to imagine what itmeans because i’m playing of course this is a message we sent to messier 13 not the other way around but it bears hammering home that if we want to establish contacts with intelligent lifebeyond earth not to imply there’s any on earth universal messages are going to belike really tricky the messier 13 signal we sent is called the arecibo message and it looks in full like this there are seven components first is a primer thenumbers one to ten in binary then some representations of human dna then anapproximation of us and our population then our solar system and which planet it is sending the message earth then the aracebo radio telescope that sent the message itself the message only has another oh 24,955 years to go before arriving but when it does and if it reaches messier 13 in about 12 more jesus cycles it’s gonna be a bit of a doozy to decode because we’re assuming in the first place that aliens will understand that this is binary or whatever their analog of binary is next that the messier thirteeners will know this is dna or that they even understand nucleotide biology then that they will ensure this is an organism not a structure or a continent then that this is a solar system not an appendage or areproductive organ or something and then that this is a machine and that’s all assuming they even use symbolic language in the first place to be fair the message was more sent ceremonially than a real hello but still when you think about it how do you send an unambiguous message to beings of unknown psychology well it’s bad enough with us there are a fair few writing systems by our own species that we still can’t decipher like bible script in lebanon or linear ain crete and that’s not to mention nuclear semiotics which is the study of well we produce a lot of nuclear waste and the stuff we don’t recycle needs somewhere to go because it’s hella dangerous and it stays dangerous forthousands of years oh well we’ll put it somewhere then okay but in the hardly implausible event that civilization collapses entirely and say in the distant future our great great greatgreat grandchildren discover our sightsfull of nuclear waste we need some way of telling them this radioactive stuff will make you dead don’t put it up your bottom and if today’s languages areforgotten by them how do you write thatwarning without words oh that’s easyjust yeah really because that could mean death it could also just be a drum kit depending on how morbid your culture is or okay how about this so left to rightthat’s obvious yeah unless they readright to left like literally millions ofhumans do today in which case it isn’tso much the nuclear waste kills yourather that it brings you back from the dead oh but it’s obvious there’s arrows yeah what does an arrow mean if you’ve never seen an actual arrow and ontop of that even if we crack universal messaging even if aliens receive andread our nonsense would they care we arethe way we are because of evolutionary pressure because of our specific climbup the tree of life we could have endedup looking a thousand other ways perhaps we could have ended up thinking a thousand other ways is it universal forother intelligent species in the universe to be curious or linguistic or social or even give a damn about looking across the knights for other mines whoknows but we’re trying to find them and the aracebo message is hardly the only message we’ve sent to the heavensbetween april 2051 and november 2069 thehuman sent message cosmic call 1 will bearriving in the constellation cygnus and sejita respectively between july 2047 and february 2017 the teenage message will make its way to the constellations ursa major cassiopeia and a few others then cosmic call 2 hello from earth anda bunch more whether received or not intransit currently are our first trieshello our name is our fledgling electromagnetic attempts to introduce ourselves to the great neighborhood buteven then even if those messages reachother beings even if those beings understand what they’re reading considering just how young we are technologically it is entirely possible that more advanced civilizations may well perceive us as babies still stuckat our early vocalization stage babbling at adults as those adults silently wait for us to begin the quests of learning cosmic grammar as we continue like featherless birds chirping desperately across the dark forests , talking of which perhaps you’ve been to one of these fancy international meetups that capital cities like arranging sometimes and the native speakers of widely used languages will usually seekeach other out and the brits and theamericans will inevitably start chuckling amongst themselves at the tiny differences in their vocabulary oh you say trunk we say boot oh you say coorslight, we say horse piss etc while just a few feet away will be standing someone who uses a completely different system of writing and grammar someone from georgia or tibet or wherever who won’t be receiving anywhere near as muchattention for some reason someone whogenuinely has linguistic differencesjust look at georgian he’s gorgeous it’s egeorgious but when it comes to language we seem to be fascinated with similar differences not different similars whichis maybe why for all of our looking outto the stars for talking aliens we seema little indifferent about the fact thataliens are sort of already here andthere’s about eight million species of them, my apprentice chunker is called marshall he’s four years old he likes tuna andwhen he’s really chill he presents the jelly beans for inspection marshall has never uttered a word before but he does sort of say things to me especially when he’s hungry, you already have food what’s this? or rather he’s probably saying.. i want make you do thing i want you bipedal furless oik!! if communication is trying to put things from your head in to other heads then this is kind of communication and though her and i share a common ancestor and though we both enjoy idleness and biographical dramasher mind is pretty unknowable to me and i’m quite sure her reality is unknowable to me too if this little lion could speak i would not understand her sort oftalking aliens are already here i live with a sort of talking alien perhaps you do too oh …but he’s not a talking intelligent alien you might reply well first of all what’d you say about my dog you piece of shit! all right then how about ants well there’s probably about a hundred trillion of them on earth made up of twelve thousand species they form alliances raid other colonies and practice division of labor just like us working as nurses foragers warriors matey with a door for a head matey has a door for a head and they build societies of a sort ,one colony in japan reportedly held 300 million of the suckers made of 45,000 nests across 700 acres about the same size as mark zuckerberg’s hawaiian estate a thriving metropolis and how with communication with sound touch and chemical cues pheromones ant pheromonescan signal anything from alarm there’s an intruder to i done a good trail come see even to propaganda pheromones lying about allegiances to get inside other nests oh but those aren’t talking intelligent aliens either you might say that’s just mindless group cooperationyeah could one of us build a space program or an airliner or even a pencilall by ourselves we look like ants from not that far up but all right how aboutbees then if you’re having a lovely dayout as a honey bee and you come uponsome nectar you’ll want to tell your mates so it’s back to the hive where youperform this figure eight dance in which you’ll communicate the richness of the nectar with the intensity of your twerk and the location of the nectar with the direction of your dance relative to thesun it’s called the waggle dance is that language uh it depends how you feel about bodria after a few drinks but either way we’ll never know because the non-human communication story ends there with insects unfortunately except of course it doesn’t whatabout electric fish who use their electric fields to chat about anything from hi i’m a boyfish or a girlfish to we’re getting attacked as simultaneously they’re trailed by sharks who have learned to eavesdrop on these electrical conversations or dolphins who some researchers think are naming themselves with entirely unique whistles ratheri mpressive if true considering most of us don’t even have an original christian names or cuttlefish who can display two totally different messages on either sides of their bodies simultaneously or elephants who seem to be sending seismic distress signals with their stamps thatcan travel tens of miles distantly through the ground or chimpanzees whocan learn and utilize hundreds of symbols from human sign language it’s debatable whether they really understand what they’re saying but in any case they can not only count with human numbers but can out perform humans over and over at memorizing number sequences or of course to humpback whales and theirsongs the songs are usually hierarchical units build into phrases which buildinto themes which build into songs they compose and exchange these songs together inside populations many songsare only sung during breeding season so something to do with getting laid butmany aren’t sometimes they’re used before feeding sometimes just alone and why do they sing at all we have no ideabut if the criteria for an alien we’re interested in is can do some technology and communication has mind we don’t understand and evolved from beyond earthmany animals are nailing two out ofthree of these and to the third onethere our last common ancestor with parrots lived probably 300 million years ago five times as far back as the dinosaurs went extinct our last common link with octopuses is likely abouttwice that 750 million years back animals might not be from an alien planet but many are certainly from an alien time which is not to say that animals will be rivaling humans any timesoon they’re busy with their own shit ,often literally but until extraterrestrials message us back if it’s different similars we’re looking for if it’s unknowable minds we’re after haven’t they been here the whole time and is the problem really that they’re not smart enough to speak our languages or that we’re currently too daft to understand theirs.