A door taken off its hinges, then a mind taken off its hinges, then a compliment. The slow journey of a metaphor that still works because of the hinge it pictures.
Blog posts tagged "language"
9 posts found
How a Trojan prince's name became a verb for browbeating. The seventeenth-century London gangs that stole it, and what hectoring still names that argument and anger do not.
An old word for an old kind of joy — where frolic comes from, why its k quietly fell off, and what the word still protects that its more serious cousins do not.
The small doorway that swallows an afternoon — where the phrase comes from, why the internet turned it into a verb, and how to tell a good rabbit hole from a bad one.
On the engineering philosophy of using two independent safeguards for the same failure — and why redundancy is sometimes wisdom, not waste.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — how language models learn to reach outside themselves for facts, and why it matters that they do.
A sceptical metaphor for what large language models are doing when they sound like they understand us — where the phrase came from, and why it still stings.
The small wrongness of an almost-human face — why it unsettles us, where the term comes from, and why the valley is no longer confined to robotics labs.
Flattering the powerful at the cost of the truth — an ancient corrosive habit, and its strange comeback as a technical term in AI alignment.