A Picture of Language

The subject of this post is the "The Picture of Language"  published in the New York Times.

I recall diagramming sentences with the same fondness as many that submitted comments on the original story as well as comments on a blog post about that story.

My  trail leading to the NY Times story started with this Naked Capitalism web site "Links" page.

To recap so far:  (Which is not far at all since there are only three paragraphs to recap) Paragraph one was the internet destination of the journey I started in paragraph three that linked me to the paragraph two intermediate site in the trail that to me to the source, the genesis of the thoughts titled "A Picture of Language"

A recap at the beginning?  If this was a "recap" joke then that would be where this ends!  After all, tomorrow is April Fools Day.  No, no joke.  Just a digression.  Yesterday on NPR "Science Friday" they did scientist jokes.  Being one helped to get the joke.  But I digress in my digression. 

Not entirely. 

You have to have an appreciation for the language, its beauty, complexity, even its ambiguity as well as its clarity to continue reading this.  If you like what language is and what language does and have some idea that those are two fundamental aspects of language then read on!

What language is:  A noun.

What language does:  A verb.

That is language:  Nouns and verbs.

The picture of language is how the nouns and verbs relate graphically.

But this is a blog about Money.  Money is a language.  A universal one.  Money as a language and like a language is all about two things in its structure.  Nouns and verbs.  What it is and what it does.  What the structure is and what the structure does.  The meaning in the relationship is whatever we choose to plug into the noun and verb place holders in the structure along with all the modifiers that are added and introduce complexity built upon the basic noun/verb relationship.  A binary relationship in which both must be present, or at least the existence of one be implied if not explicitly stated.

But I digress.

But I like to digress.

But digression only functions beneficially if it brings the thread of thought back to the original course.

Paragraph three linked back to paragraph two that linked to the source; paragraph one.  That journey was simple but had some interesting digressions.  You could have skipped the subsequent paragraphs and simply jumped this one.  I could have made the jump for you by editing out everything in between with "select and delete" in order to get to the point. 

The point is that language can be viewed as a picture.  That is not like creating a word picture.  It is a picture of words.  A picture of relationships that conveys a conceptual meaning that word picture in our heads that is related to but entirely different than the picture of words seen on the screen.

How that all happens is in our connectomes. 

Connectomes are a digression from my original intention to write about the beauty of sentence diagramming.  A digression with a purpose that I would ultimately bring in a winding fashion back to the continuity of this post.  However, I will make that  dangling digression because it is Saturday morning and I need to complete the trailer hitch wiring on my van so I can tow my trailer to Tucson to escape the cold rain of spring in Bend and get started on building strength and endurance on the bike in a warmer climate there so I can apply the results when the climate is warmer here.  

That too, is a digression. 

Enough for now.  I shall return, as all good digressions should.