When in doubt pathologise!

Doctors study long and hard
how not to get themselves disbarred

Med school's where they learn their trade
some specialise in getting laid

and on the day they graduate
they take some time to celebrate

they sally forth, they boldly go
to make a name and pots of dough

always keeping front of mind
the foremost lesson of their kind:

"If you're uncertain or unwise
when in doubt, pathologise!"

HOME

eBooks by Cosmic Rapture
(for kindle, tablet, smartphone or e-reader.)

NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS. This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously and grotesquely illustrated.

AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?). We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.

MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS. A disturbing repository of quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.

MASTRESS & OTHER TWISTED TAILS. An unholy corpus of oddities, strangelings, bizarritudes and peculiaritisms, including but not limited to barbaric episodes of herring-flinging and kipper-kissing. A cacklingly bizarre read that may induce fatal hysteria. Not Recommended!

FIENDS & FREAKS and serpents, dragons, devils, lobsters, anguished spirits, hungry ghosts, hell-beings, zombies, organ-grinders, anti-gods, gods and other horse-thieves you wouldn't want to meet in a dark cosmos. Immature Content! Adults Maybe.

HAGS TO HAGGIS. An obnoxious folio featuring a puke of whiskey-soaked war-nags, witches, maniacs, manticores and escapegoats. Not to mention (please don't!) debottlenecking and desilofication, illustrated. Take your brain for a walk on the wild side. Leave your guts behind.

Mutter, Utter and Stutter: Demeaning of Words

Engraved portrait of Dorothy Pentreath, last native speaker of the Cornish language, of Paul near Mousehole, Cornwall (c. 1692-1777)

English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Welsh, Swahili, Japanese and the like are called languages presumably because they satisfy unambiguous criteria. I say “presumably” because I don’t think there are any unambiguous criteria that apply to every thing we label as “language”.

I was going to ask whether we really and truly know what is a language and what is not. But then I realised that the real issue is that we just can’t agree on a definition that satisfies everyone. Another problem is that we use language to define language, which is circular reasoning, which inevitably leads to self-reflexivity and paradox. For example, I'm using language to explain why you shouldn't use language to explain language.

Most if not all people would agree that dialects, creoles and pidgins are languages. But what about “dead”/archaic languages such as Latin or Cornish?

What about sign language, music, morse code, mime, and mathematics? What about the barking of dogs, the songs of birds and whales and dolphins, the scent trails of ants, the dance of the bees? Computer programming languages? Computer machine code? Which is a language and which is not? Give reasons for your answers.

Language is a tool that helps language-users manage information. Language is a tool that helps language users create, locate, capture, transmit and receive information, as a first step on the road to truth or meaning. It’s the first step because articulating comes before validating; uttering precedes verifying. (And BTW there may not yet be computers that meet the conditions of “personhood”. But there absolutely are computers that are language-users. In fact, all computers are language-users.)

Down the toilet of lost souls

The Same God So That He Obtained Of The Magus Was By Demons Be Pulled In Pieces: Engraving by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Around the Courtyard of Dispaire
The stony benches stare
their stony glares I’m sitting there
belittling where I’m splitting hairs
unpicking nits let’s call it quits
before my mind’s behind forgets
that most of all I’m feeling numb
the cold befriends my lonely bum
it all depends it never ends
it twists and bends
its weary way it wends...
around the Courtyard of Dispaire.

Along the Hallway of Tomorrow
All the tumours beg and borrow
bloated bags of pus and vinegar
shiver, quiver, quaver or deliver
punctuated full-length features
starring all pipe-smoking creatures
eponymous green-hatted leprechauns
strangelings taut and sinning blameless
well-known if not despised and nameless
unhinged, unhorsed and plump with sorrow
trotting comes my old friend Zorro...
along the Hallway of Tomorrow.

Harmonies of baked liverwurst

The faint tinkling of fairy music
evaporating on the sparkly misty meadow
fleeing the Blade of Intention
fearing cold nakedness
its verisimilitude stillborn, sometimes rebirthed:
Harmonies of Baked Liverwurst.

Encircling that which won’t
or that witch will
shorn of etymological linguini
equilibria egregiously punctuated
its verisimilitude quiver-cursed:
Harmonies of Baked Liverwurst.

Arrowshot, debarked and deboned
so very like the river
burst its bank, the peoples’ bank
sea-stark, unthroned
its verisimilitude to health renursed:
...

The Shortest Sentence

What is the shortest (grammatically, semantically and syntactically) "proper" sentence in English ? I think it's "Be.", which is the same length as "Do." but comes before "Do." in alphabetical order of the initial letter. The sentence "I." lacks an object not to mention a verb, as do the exclamatories "O!", "Ah!", "Mm!", "La!" etc. So it would seem that "Be." is the winner, unless anyone can come up with another candidate?.

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meeting of the mindless

The presenter's voice was low and slow, the soporific drone permeating what remained of Anne's caffeine-deprived consciousness. In the grip of full-blown doodlemania, her glassy eyes stared into her notebook as her pen moved randomly across the page.

Interminable, the presenter's so-called words surged languidly through her skull-case into her soggy brain, the toxic monotony eroding her fragile consciousness:

"...committed to sustainably focus on debottlenecking our key deliverables, empowering and incentivizing optimal customer-facing engagement," continued the presenter, relentless and unrelenting as a tidal bore.

God don't some people just love the sound of their own voice, thought Anne to herself. Death by a thousand powerpoints... but only ninety minutes to go, unless some jerkwad asks a question, which is pretty much guaranteed... The realization multiplied her despair exponentially.

"...and given our objective to leverage stakeholder core competencies, our imperatives encompass picking the low-hanging fruit as key to implementing the new paradigm embedded in our mission-critical strategic tactics," the presenter paused. An almost imperceptible frown crossed his brow as his eyes swept the room.

"And externalising supplier desilofication will mean eating our own dogfood from the get-go," he said, "but that's enough from me. Anne, your thoughts?"

Startled into wakefulness, she looked up from her notebook.

"Uh... that's a no-brainer..." she stammered, praying for more words to come.

Then the solutionization of her predicament arrived. The fire drill alarm brought the meeting to a close.

HOME

eBooks by Cosmic Rapture

NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS
This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously illustrated by over 20 grotesque images you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.

AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?)
We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.

MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS
A disturbing repository of quotably quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.

MASTRESS & OTHER TWISTED TAILS, ILLUSTRATED: an unholy corpus of oddities, strangelings, bizarritudes and peculiaritisms

FIENDS & FREAKS Adults-only Tales of Serpents, Dragons, Devils, Lobsters, Anguished Spirits, Gods, Anti-gods and Other Horse-thieves You Wouldn't Want to Meet in a Dark Kosmos: 4th Edition

HAGS TO HAGGIS Whiskey-soaked Tails of War-nags, Witches, Manticores and Escapegoats, Debottlenecking and Desilofication, Illustrated