On the necessity of nouns

[simont]

Over a board game at the Gallery yesterday evening, someone mentioned that ‘echolalia’ was the technical term for the habit of repeating your interlocutor's last few words as they say them. drswirly looked at me and said ‘It's also a thingy on whatsit, isn't it?’. Now normally I giggle gently at Gareth's fondness for whatsits and oojits and thingys in place of genuine nouns, but in this case I didn't even notice until after the fact, because I had effortlessly (and correctly) parsed this as ‘a track on a Dead Can Dance album’, without registering that all the actual content in the sentence had apparently been telepathic. How very silly.

In other news, it occurred to me last night that Zeus was the original Philanders & Swan. Ahem.

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Perhaps an indication that you and Gareth have known each other far too long?

Oh, and *thwap* for the Zeus joke.

[lnr]

Have you ever played armadillo? It's an armadillo armadillo where you replace every armadillo with the armadillo armadillo. Surprisingly easy to understand.

[simont]

No, I haven't. Ooh.

Odd that it's actually not too difficult to respond to you here without needing to use a single one, though. The above doesn't sound too stilted, and yet throughout it there isn't a single armadillo.

Bum.

Re:

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

Except for the armadillo badger which you should replace with the armadillo badger.

[senji.livejournal.com]

Communication works. :-)

Armadillo

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Nouns? Absence:
Communication continuity. Telepathy!
Presence, exclusivity? Loneliness.

Mountain presence.
Trees, water, air, rock:
Noun haiku sound.

(There's an important ontological armadillo in trying to write without armadilloes, but armadillo knows what it is!)

interlocution

[joshdavis]

Interlocution is a fantastic word. *applause*

It could be called psychic.

It might just be a mirroring of neural network patterns due to similar training of said net through similar experiences.

eg, you have a partial copy of them in your head.

Fun with semantics.