Return-Path: <tushar@math.uchicago.edu>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Thu, 10 Sep 1992 03:59:09 CDT
From:         tushar@MATH.UCHICAGO.EDU
Subject:      A milestone
Comments: To: words-l@uga.cc.uga.edu

Today my fingers made the billionth keystroke on a computer keyboard.

Sigh!!!

How fast the days have passed by, how cruel they have been in extorting labour,
which resulted finally only in creating ephemeral objects, read in a minute,
destroyed the next!!!

Sigh!!!

This is a product of some musings I started forcing out of me on reaching a
milestone, just like most nibs.

How very nice of the English language to have a good linear script which made
the job that much less difficult for the first typewriter designers.

How appropriate it is that digital exercise is converted into digital
information.

How incredible that sentences can be made with bare hands.

But most of all, how awesome the flexibility of the editor.

As I build a sentence up on the screen I realize how much I am dependent on
the truly amazing power the computer gives me in dealing with words.

When I start with an upper case "S" typed on the editor screen, little do I
know what it is going to develop into.

It is an art to choose the right production rule. <subject><predicate>,
something more complicated, what will convey my message most effectively?
There is no theory for this, just intuition.

On and on it goes in slow increments. A tree is being grown, and at each
node there are decisions to make. Is this <NP> to be made terminal? Is this
<VP> here to be expanded even more? It is a tortuous process and often there
are no clues to guide.

Time to stick in terminal words. Sometimes the lexicon is not strong enough,
and remote sources have to be telnetted to. There is no guarantee that words
will be available, but one worries through it. And slowly the sentence
materializes.

It doesn't always look right. There has been no mistake in building it, but
its words just don't hang together. Sometimes, one can connect to a thesaurus
server and make hard substitutions, but you can never be sure that that will
improve matters. More often than not, words have to be collapsed back and
expanded differently. I have gone back to an initial "S", sometimes. It is a
labour of love, debugging sentences.

Painful work, small returns. Why Do I Do It, I occasionally indulge in
histrionic wonder. What's great about a nice debugged sentence? What is the
point in going on with this, paragraph after paragraph?

A full grown tree is a treat to see, a relief from the stunted shrubs of real
life. It's geek heaven to apply recursive rules, to go through a second pass,
to do minute adjustments. It's a reaffirmation of the ultimate evanescence of
all human creation.

There are people who advocate that sentences should be short, stark, stripped
to bare essentials, bereft of decorations, merely functional. We are word-
drunk and wallow in that sensation. Old people tired of speaking for a
lifetime might need sentences like a surgeon's knife, delicate, small, sharp
and always dead on the mark. We like wielding, even though clumsily, heavy
bejewelled scimitars.

The world began when the ultimate template Sentence was uttered by the goddess,
and it still reverberates in the fine grain of the ether. We just keep hacking
at the air to loosen out more and more of it. No, one doesn't hope to get it
all, one doesn't envisage a day when we will just change parameters in that
Sentence and produce any desired sentence, but it is such an intoxicating
activity to keep trying extracting it.

Well, already the billion mark has receded so far away.

SIGH!!!


tushar
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