Language on not quite an expert

Against E-prime

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to follow E-prime in my writing since 2020. However, Wikipedia notes:

Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.

As a source for “others doubt its utility” Wikipedia links to “The Top Ten Arguments Against E-Prime”, which I finally made the time to read.

Following the posts of a now defunct E-prime forum archived here, I found the full text of French’s article, written for a 1992 symposium about the E-prime controversy. I’ll summarize:

Markdown everywhere

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Markdown more and more, not just for writing posts here, also for writing messages in Slack and writing documents in Notion.

As detailed in this article, Markdown emphasizes structure over presentation, which works well for my job in which I prioritize substance over optics. I consider the simple structure of Markdown a feature rather than a bug, since it takes effort to extract the substance and express something simply.

Monaspace

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From “Font activations”:

[N]ow words are everywhere treated as data, as numbers, and they are rarely printed at all. … Fonts perhaps become more salient as they become the only thing that people are expected to play with when it comes to words, once it is drilled into everyone that it is required for efficiency and political conformity to let machines do all the writing and the editing and the “thinking.”

The beauty of an ambiguous greeting

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I often deliberately greet people ambiguously: “What’ve you been up to?”

The ambiguity lets the other person direct the conversation toward what interests them. It also gives them an out: “Not much”.

Furthermore, the ambiguity gauges their levels of attention: “At work or outside of work?” Though different people want to share more or less about certain aspects of themselves, I try to create substantial space: “Both, either”.

Journey of the airplane magazine

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have fond memories of the airplane magazine. In my most distinct memory of it, my sister and I actually brought a copy off of the plane, to browse in bed. Blowing past the articles, we admired and gawked at the fancy and quirky merchandise advertised inside. To us, those advertisements served as low fantasy, a conduit to imagine a lifestyle where not only did we need a multi-color pool light with different modes, we bought one on a plane!

Pun III: unreal tea

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been wanting to read briefly about the foundations of philosophy, including metaphysics (what exists), epistemics (what we know), and ethics (what we consider right).

At this point, I’ve become comfortable with eating alone. So today I, by myself with a book in hand, headed over to the Vietnamese restaurant near my apartment.

Mmm, mmm, mmm, some good eatin':

On my table, phở with bone marrow
On the table to my left, my stranger’s friend’s dad wouldn’t let the friend become a bartender like him
On the table to my right, my stranger’s friend is going through a physiosocial dry spell, in incredible detail

I had put down my very short introduction to metaphysics to tune into the un-real tea.

Pun II: fluke

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my bardo between Google and Glean, I received a payout from Google for my unredeemed paid time off - literally thousands of dollars all at once. I saw it as a sign that I should vacation more,¹ and that I should treat myself.

So I went to the fanciest restaurant recommended to me, in New York City no less, which cost over $300 for the prix fixe menu. My grad student friends couldn’t afford the money, and my finance friends couldn’t afford the time (on a weekday), so I went as a party of one² to lightly menace the fine dining service staff.

Pun I: frankincense

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In one of our many hours-long calls, I was telling my friend about my attempt to mimic Hwyl: the motivation, and the mixing, and ultimately, the mess.

I felt like a mad scientist, or as I explained “this may become my Mindful Mommy Joker moment”. I had the essential oils: vetiver, cypress, and frankincense (the most expensive). However, I was roughly approximating the other listed ingredients, obscure fragrance chemicals like eugenol and d-limonene, with other essential oils I had on hand.

Third person singular simple present

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The product summary for my new electric shaver stand declares:

Select cleaning intensity to keep for optimal performance every day.

Ok, so do I have to select the cleaning intensity? Or does the stand select the cleaning intensity?

I thought I did, so I spent a while searching how I should select the cleaning intensity. Upon reading multiple product manuals, it turns out the stand does.

To clarify subject-less descriptions, you should use third person singular simple present:

Good apologies

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Most people don’t communicate well, and by extension most people don’t apologize well.

A bad apology, a selfish apology, downplays the impact and throws out excuses, in an attempt to make the apologizer feel better. However, if you hurt me, you don’t get to dictate how it affected me, and I don’t really care about why it happened.

A good apology, a generous one, understands or explores the impact and moves to mitigate it going forward. It takes more, and it gives more.

Hon Wasabi

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At Saru Sushi Bar, you can order the “Hon Wasabi”. Demonstrating that “food and menus are uniquely challenging to translate”, I find this translation both incompetent and functional.

If “Hon” just means “True”, you could just call it “True Wasabi”. It reminds me of “Just according to keikaku. (Translator’s note: keikaku means plan)

However, if you want to communicate that this “Hon Wasabi” won’t taste like other “wasabi” your customers have had before. And you don’t want to explain that “wasabi” in the US probably contains just horseradish powder and food dye, calling it “Hon Wasabi” does the trick!

Home in the Design District

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I walk through the Design District of San Francisco, which houses many interior design showrooms, I see parts of homes. I see shiny model kitchens and bathrooms, even elaborate lamps. However, I don’t see “homes.”

I don’t see “homes,” because I know no one is really using these kitchens, bathrooms, nor lamps right now. They currently serve as display and merchandise.

I realize then that my intuitive idea of “home” involves people living. It includes relationships and behaviors, not just stuff - something to keep in mind as I make my “home” in my new place.

Mocktails

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Mocktails” refers to non-alcoholic drinks mocking alcoholic cocktail drinks. I don’t like the term “mocktails.”

“Mocktails” implies a natural, superior alcoholic and an imitation, inferior non-alcoholic. However, non-alcoholic drinks have some advantage of flavor and flexibility. Alcohol tastes bitter and burns your throat, because your body recognizes it as toxic; non-alcoholic drinks don’t have to “overcome” that taste hurdle. And most people aren’t trying to get sch-wasted on a workday; they could then drink something non-alcoholic without guilt.

How to read today

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished reading How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. Originally published in 1940, the book has aged surprisingly well, save for a few antiquated passages.

Since 1940, the Internet has radically changed how we read. Websites and search engines have largely replaced physical media. And against this unprecedentedly large collection of digital media, their advice, that different pieces deserve different amounts/levels of your time and effort, rings even more true.

叫化鸡

Sat, 14 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The idea of “kaiserkrainer” reminds me of emperor’s chicken, more commonly known as 叫化鸡, beggar’s chicken. You cook this dish by wrapping the chicken in clay and lotus leaves. Various folktales explain this cooking method. In one version, the beggar stole the chicken from the emperor and used this method to avoid attracting attention. In another, the emperor, to stay in touch with the struggles of the people, dined with a beggar, and enjoyed the chicken so much he added it to the imperial menu. In yet another, the emperor, born a peasant, added his favorite childhood dish to the imperial menu.

Trie-d chords

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I explained the notion of “chords.” English words analogize to “chords” of Latin letters. And as it turns out, thinking of English words as “chords” gives us a useful way to approach common problems involving English words.

Suppose you wanted to check if a “word” (sequence of Latin letters) exists in a dictionary. Naively, you could go through every entry in the dictionary. Clearly, this would take unpleasantly long for extremely large dictionaries.

Chords

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I play guitar, the notes A, C, and E form the A minor chord. The notes A, C#, and E form the A major chord.

When I type on my stenotype keyboard, the chord HAOEL pressed simultaneously forms “heel.” The chord HAEL pressed simultaneously forms “heal.”

When I write Chinese, the simplified Han characters 花 and 园 form the segment 花园, meaning garden. The characters 花 and 椒 form the segment 花椒, meaning Sichuan peppercorn.

Look at all those links to other posts! I’ve started to notice the idea of “chords” across domains. You can combine notes, keys, characters, whatever you’d like to call them, to form distinct meanings.

On the joys and perils of a profane name

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Coq

Coq provides an interactive theorem prover for proofs about programming languages and other computer systems. Coq plays on the name of creator Thierry Coquand, puns on the Calculus of Constructions (CoC) Coquand was working on before, and follows the French tradition of naming tools after animals (coq meaning rooster in French).

This year, the Coq team announced it would receive proposals to rename Coq. “Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations [and] reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name” spurred this effort. The announcement goes so far as to assert “[t]he only thing that is clear at this point is that we cannot just ignore the issue [of the name Coq] and do nothing.” The wiki documents a significant effort to change the name, paragraphs of advantages and disadvantages plus another page dedicated to the implications of changing the name.

CJK segmentation

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s return to the Unicode Standard from the last post:

Programmers do not expect the characters c, h, a, and t alone to tell us whether chat is a French word for cat or an English word meaning informal talk. … Similarly, the Han characters are often combined to “spell” words whose meaning may not be evident from the constituent characters. For example, the two characters “to cut” and “hand” mean “postage stamp”" in Japanese, but the compound may appear to be nonsense to a speaker of Chinese or Korean.

CJK fonts

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

You may wonder, based on my previous post, how Unicode handles when the same Han character gets written differently in different languages. Writing evolves over time, so can we represent the same Han character with the same Unicode code point across languages? Unicode answers:

Even where there are substantial variations in the standard way of writing a character from locale to locale, if the fundamental identity of the character is not in question, then a single character is encoded in Unicode. … It is well-recognized that the Han characters involved are the same, even when used in different countries to write different languages. … There are occasional instances of unified characters whose typical Chinese glyph and typical Japanese glyph are distinct enough that the Chinese glyph will be unfamiliar to the typical Japanese reader, e.g., 直 U+76F4. … Where a distinction in style needs to be made (for example, Chinese-style vs. Japanese-style glyphs in the same document), appropriate fonts should be applied to the specific text as needed.

Language carries history

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

To demonstrate language carries history, I’ll use Unicode.

Unicode

First, what “Unicode”? Unicode defines encoding characters (formally, graphemes, a minimally distinctive unit of writing), including letters, symbols, and emoji 😮. Unicode covers most of the world’s writing systems, and nearly all web pages use Unicode (UTF-8).

Unicode provides a unique code point, a number, for each character. For example, the (decimal) number 75, 0b01001011 in binary, represents the uppercase K. Computers represent data in binary, so essentially Unicode provides a mapping from binary data to characters.

叉燒包

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This week I’m staying near San Francisco’s Chinatown. I woke up with a craving for 叉燒包, so I headed to the closest Chinese bakery.

Translation

叉燒包 has pinyin chā shāo bāo. On menus, I often see it romanized “char siu bao.” However, most often I see it translated as “BBQ pork bun.”

I don’t like the name “BBQ pork bun.” I like 叉燒, and I don’t really like American barbeque. 叉燒 has a sweet flavor (from honey) and red color (red fermented bean curd, red food coloring) though, so for the benefit of people not familiar, e.g. non-Asian customers, “BBQ pork bun” provides an efficient approximation.

Serving tea

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In my last post, I ended up defining tea as:

Tea is a beverage made by steeping (a perceptible level of) the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant (possibly mixed with other ingredients, often other plants) in water.

Despite a fairly thorough process to arrive as this definition, I think this definition still doesn’t fully capture the significance of tea. Particularly with food and drink, significance can come from how we consume. To demonstrate this, let’s describe three ways to serve tea, from practical to ceremonial.

What is tea?

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start with a strict definition:

Tea is a beverage made by steeping the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant in hot water.

Like when I talked about meat, this definition bothers me. Let’s expand it.

Water temperature

Do we have to steep the leaves in hot water? Instinctually, you might say we have to use boiling water. However, people often advise using less-than-boiling water for high quality green tea, e.g. 80 degrees Celsius or lower for matcha. In fact, “a few tea masters in Japan [even] suggest that the optimal way to prepare matcha is with cool water” to maximize the umami.

Why Aristotle?

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Recently I read this article about friendship in the Atlantic. In it, Arthur Brooks writes:

According to [Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics], friendships exist along a kind of ladder. At the bottom rung—where emotional bonds are weakest and the happiness benefits are lowest—are friendships based on utility to each other in work or social life. … At the highest level are friendships of virtue, or what Aristotle called “perfect friendship.” These friendships are pursued for their own sake, and not instrumental to anything else.

imprecise words

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

no set of words, arranged in any order, can make you feel the exact way I do

not even “I,” my past self, and “you,” my future self

good words, however, will get you to understand

understand, not feel, the sensations and emotions

yet those good words may not do good

some sensations and emotions I do not want to understand

at least not yet

What is meat?

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start with a widely accepted definition:

Meat is animal flesh eaten as food.

Does that definition bother you? It bothers me.

Imprecise

I cook meat (as defined above) often; I eat meat even more often. Yet in neither case do I tend to think about meat as animal flesh. In fact, I would rather not think of the meat as animal flesh; that thought upsets me.

Unintuitive boundaries

This definition of meat includes fried spider and excludes Impossible Burger, a binary that very much contradicts my intuition. How can burgers and sashimi and the aforementioned fried spider fall under the same umbrella, yet Impossible Burger gets left in the rain?¹

A mistaken, corrected, still simplified history of English

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mistaken

In my head I have the extremely loose timeline:

Some centuries ago, the English colonized America; a few centuries later those colonists declared independence and became the United States of America.

From that timeline, I thought:

In an effort to establish their own identity, Americans invented new spellings, e.g. “colour” became “color” and “centre” became “center.”

as well I thought:

Further in that effort, Americans reformed their accents, most noticeably going hard on the /r/s after vowels, “hard” not “hahd.”

Is seaweed a plant?

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I was eating seaweed salad and this question occured to me.

What is “seaweed”?

Seaweed refers to (many species of) multicellular marine algae, where according to me (not quite an expert), algae means “not necessarily plant.”¹

For simplicity, let’s focus on edible seaweed, which falls into 3 common groups:²

green algae, such as green caviar (a.k.a. sea grapes)
red algae, such as nori (of sushi fame)
brown algae, such as kombu (of miso soup fame)

What is “plant”?

You might’ve heard of the kingdom Plantae. Like I, you might’ve thought Plantae (“ooh, Latin, look at me”) had a precise, generally accepted definition. Well, you can take that thought, that temptation of a straightforward answer, and throw it in the trash.

Medium nudges expression

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

In the previous post linked above, I introduced the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and proposed that the hypothesis applied to both natural and technical languages. This time, I want to expand that idea, that rules and structure influence thinking, to the medium itself.

“The medium is the message”

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, media theorist Marshall McLuhan proposes that the nature of the medium carries greater importance than the content of its messages. For example, the medium of electric light, independent of content, carries the importance of enabling clear and easily shapable visual expression in the dark.

(Technical) language nudges thought

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the structure of a language influences the cognition of its speaker. Now, before we proceed, I caution that “there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and mis-application than the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.’” Let’s see an example.

Whodunit?

In English, you would tend to say “They broke the vase,” whereas in Spanish you would more tend to say “El jarrón se rompió” (example), which literally translates to “the vase broke itself” (paywall).

PuPu

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Today, I’d like to introduce you to PuPu. Not poo poo, PuPu with the letter u represents the contagious nature of arbitrariness.

For example, let’s say I wanted to estimate how many metal cans you eat per week. I claim

You eat exactly 1 metal can per hour (completely arbitrary).
Each day has 24 hours (true).
Each week has 7 days (true).

Therefore, I would estimate you eat exactly 1 * 24 * 7 = 168 metal cans per week.

Post-modernism and irony

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Inspiration

Post-modernism

Post-modernism rejects universal truth and grand narrative. Instead, post-modernism poses meaning as only contextual. For example, a post-modernist might claim there doesn’t exist a god or gods who gives every person meaning, and there doesn’t exist any set of morals or values that apply to all groups of people.

lol something matters

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I: A Marketing 300 lecture

In the winter of 2019, I took MKT 300 as required by my business degree. The research interests of the professor, Dr. Carolyn Yoon, lived in the intersection of neuroscience and marketing.¹

Within her interests, how does presentation affect people’s ability to internalize the message of an informational campaign (e.g. PSA debunking myths)? In one lecture, Professor Yoon provided an example that really piqued my interest: a CDC poster of facts and myths regarding the flu vaccine. Professor Yoon explained that after a while, the “false” or “not” component of the message sometimes faded away, potentially backfiring on the attempt to clear falsehoods.

Punch up, not down

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start with 2 observations:

Our words affect others.
We can control our words.

It follows that we should control our words to have the desired effect on other people. Abstractly, we should say things that promote good and avoid harm.

Jokes

People often use jokes to express contentious or controversial ideas with less risk. Personally, I find myself more inclined to watch a stand-up embedded with political themes than read an explicitly political essay, though sometimes I will find the space for the latter.

Vampires

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Vampires have occupied popular culture for quite a while, so I figured figuring out what they might mean deserved some of my attention.

Symbols

Authors use symbols to imbue their writing with meaning. Symbolism, however, rarely amounts to just “X stands for Y.”

Take, for example, Frankenstein’s monster. Famous monsters in literature and film often reflect the anxieties of writers and audiences in their time. In this case, Frankenstein’s monster evokes fears of what science might reveal in contrast to faith. However, Frankenstein’s monster appeals to many other ideas, such as themes of creation and internal vs. external.

E-prime and precise language

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

When we use the verb to be we can mean a lot of things, including, but not limited to:

Identity: “I am Steve.”
Inclusion/exclusion: “The tomato is a fruit.”
Predication: “They are excellent.”
Existence: “There is a reason.”
Location: “She is there.”

To be, or not to be

The versatile roles to be plays can lead to ambiguity. For example, if I say “this food is good,” what do I really mean?

Beauty and style

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

A quick post on a useful distinction.

Beauty

Beauty is socially defined. What is beautiful is almost always exclusive, like being young or rich. Imagine a runway model.

Style

Style is individually defined. You can be stylish at any age, at any level of wealth, no matter the circumstances of your birth. Imagine a drag queen.

Conclusion

I am still trying to find my style.

Diegesis is not an excuse

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Look at the big word in the title!

What is diegesis?

First, the elephant in the room: what does it mean?

For the non-critics in the audience, diegesis refers to details within the universe of the story. This is in contrast to details within our universe.

For example, suppose you are reading Things Fall Apart. The character Okonkwo’s exile is diegetic; it happens within the story. On the other hand, the novel’s first publication year of 1958 is non-diegetic; it happens outside the story.