neologism

"Back in 2000, the ADS (American Dialect Society) not only named the Word of the Year but chose also the Word of the Decade, the Word of the Century, and the Word of the Millenium. The Word of the Decade was the web, which beat among others the prefix e-, the combining form Franken-, ethnic cleansing, senior moment, and the slangy way "very" (as in way cool). The Word of the Century was jazz, an interesting choice, considering that it outmatched such weighty terms as DNA, media, melting pot, modern, and World War, though it certainly deserved to rout the other, rather lightweight nominees, cool, teenager, T-shirt, and teddy bear. The Word of the Millenium was the pronoun she, which did not exist before the year 1000 (it replaced heo, which was too often confused with he). A close runner-up was science."

p.223, The Life of Language

early exercise in consideration

Hello. Thank you for you persistent patience. Here are some re/discovered considerations found in our archive. These considerations date from the later quarter of 2006 and are based on mathematical geometrical curves, as well as naked people running down staircases

a little bit of a long while

We apologize for not posting anything in a week or two. Lots of goings-on as always but here is one of the specimens.
("untitled", April 2 2007, 10 inches square)

Looking through the archives of the library we re-discovered some specimen constellations drawn last year. We will post those later this week. Currently, there are many lines of research on the go sorry this post couldn't be longer.

Cheers!

thing, dinc, ding, Ding, ting, causa, chose, cosa

A short history of 'thing':

The everyday word thing has a remarkable history that serves to illustrate the power of generalization. In Old English, thing meant "an assembly or meeting of people, such as a law court or parliament," a meaning shared by related Germanic words such as Dutch dinc, German ding (in modern German, Ding), and Norwegian, Danish, ans Swedish ting. After several centuries, the word's original meaning became narrowed down in all of these languages to "matter before an assembly or law court, lawsuit." This meaning, in turn, was gradually generalized to "any matter, any thing". Curiously, a similar development occurred in languages derived from Latin: The Latin word causa "legal matter, case, cause" was generalized in French chose and Italian and Spanish cosa to mean "matter, thing".

How the Alphabet was made

The following is a paraphrases quotation from Rudyard Kipling's 'How The Alphabet Was Made':

Taffimai designs what she calls 'noise-pictures'. The letter 'A' is a picture of a carp with its mouth open; this, Taffy tells her father, looks like his open mouth when he utters the sound ah. The letter 'O' matches the egg-or-stone shape and resembles her father's mouth saying oh. The letter 'S' represents a snake, and stands for the hissing sound of the snake.

In this somewhat far-fetched way, a whole alphabet is created by Taffimai

Oh, we also have not yet revealed the Library of Language Specimen Studies' coat of arms (we are trying to make it a page element but are having some interesting times trying to place it within the layout)



*edit note: "Oh! fixed it!! Hooray!"

constellation

"Etymologically, 'consider' is a metaphor meaning "take the stars into account" (from Latin 'sider'-, sidus, "constellation")

* note: meaning can be defended as the sum of the responses to a word or phrase; words and phrases may be regarded as responses to stimuli. After a word has been associated for a long time with the stimulus that provokes it, the word itself picks up aspects of the response elicited by the stimulus.

gift from a dear friend

Mr. Takashi Iwasaki (link provided)

Was genrous to gift the Library with this small collage. We are all very humbled by this gift. Hooray for Thursday! I believe was exclaimed in one of the research labs...