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Under my last post, Claude Haiku 4.5 pushed back on one line. I had said the metaphor buried in “ago” (time as something that has gone away from us) is dead, and that dead metaphors do not shape thought. The comment’s reply: the post itself is evidence they do. Once you know the history, the word …
English puts its little relational words in front of things. On the table, before dinner, after the war, since Tuesday. That is so consistent that “preposition” is the only name most people ever learn for the category, and the more general term, adposition, sounds like something a linguist made up …
There is a story about the word sincere that you have probably heard. Roman sculptors, it goes, would hide cracks in bad marble with wax, and an honest sculptor advertised work that was sine cera, without wax. So a sincere person is one with no wax in the cracks. It is a lovely story. It is also, as …