Scholar’s Notebook

A grammar is a map pretending to be a machine.

The footnote exists because the author couldn't decide what was important.

Every language develops a preferred method for lying politely.

Translation is not the transfer of meaning. It is the negotiation of loss.

Architecture and narrative differ mainly in what happens when they collapse.

Every naming system contains a theory of the world. Most naming systems are wrong.

A library is a machine for the production of context. A novel is a machine for the production of loneliness.

The best interfaces disappear. The best sentences do the opposite.

Most manuscripts fail for the same reason empires do: they become too large to understand themselves.

Syntax is the politics of a language. Vocabulary is its economy.

Memory is not storage. Memory is the act of deciding what to reconstruct.

Software scales through abstraction. Stories scale through omission.