And lo On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:56:14 -0000, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull>  
did spake thusly:

> Mueen Nawaz wrote:
>> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> When you think about it, the weird thing isn't so much that all human
>>> languages are inherantly vague and ambiguous. The weird thing is that
>>> this is almost never a problem. In the overwhelming majority of cases,
>>> everybody still knows *exactly* what you mean, even though strictly
>>> speaking most sentences could have several possible meanings.
>>  	Communication isn't all verbal.
>
> Indeed. Especially when it's written in a book.
>
> (*I* may have managed to read three volumes of Douglas Adams without  
> realising it was ment to be funny, but most people don't seem to make  
> that mistake.)

Pick up a copy of PeopleWatching by Desmond Norris. It's a dense tome to  
get into, but interesting none the less. Less dense and more fun is  
Watching the English by Kate Fox, but obviously more anglocentric.

>>> This leaves me wondering... how the **** does the human mind actually
>>> work anyway?!
>>  	You're not the first...
>
> Heh. I'm sure I'm also not the first to suspect that "if brains were  
> simple enough to understand, we would be too simple to understand them".

Indeed. An analogy I've heard as to researching what goes on in the brain  
is that you've one person monitoring an enormous bank of dials and another  
person in a pitch-black room with all the controlling machinery  
occasionally prodding something and shouting back "What did that do?"

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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