jueves, 9 de junio de 2011

Because It Can #3 - Contextual Creation or Creational Contexts.

by Liam Bourret-Nyffeler

So.... prefixes... There was a moment when in Spanish I felt ... a little put out by Des___

Descomponer... from component and the negative nature of the prefix (for those who don't speak Spanish) indicate a lack of composition... i.e. it fell apart/doesn't work anymore. But that implies it used to work fine. At least as far as I can tell. 

Spanish launches me on the trail of discovery in English.

So what about desconocido or unknown (person). To me that means I never knew the person. Not that I used to. 

So    un/dis____   means   (Not currently)___. Whether never the case or that it was the case before but no longer so.

And so we come to the knot. "The knot was left untied"... if their used to be a knot.. ok we have the broken down type of dis... if never then WAIT... aha the text didn't say was undone... but LEFT undone... so the person never got round to tying it. And yet a knot by definition is a tied something.. cable, string....

Yet we can express something about the knot that never existed... even describe that knot; as undone. So how do I know which things are just string and which things are "undone knots"? (In the never before sense)
Do potential undone knots exist at all points on a string? Are all string really just knots that never formed? Or are knots modified strings?
Does it matter? (No)
Why do I care? (Mostly for the fun thought experiment)
Why does language do this to us?... yes... again
Be..cause it ...can.

Ha-ha got you. No. Obviously the knot must surely be an applied effort so the context of undone implies someone was about to do it and we understand the "undoneness"es in general and by the more specific varieties through context because of rule no. 1
Context is Everything