Charles Fillmore died in February. I only met the man once, briefly, but his work has been a great inspiration to me over the years, particularly frame semantics. Last week I came across this sign above, advertising a bar. The word “screwdriver” is ambiguous, because it can mean a hand tool to turn screws, or a drink made with vodka and orange juice. Fillmore’s frames help us to explore and understand that ambiguity.

Slides from my talk today at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics.

The American linguist Lauren Hall-Lew, currently living in Edinburgh, was musing on Twitter recently about how both Scotch and Oriental are considered offensive when categorizing people, but not offensive when describing alcohol or rugs. Her main point is valid and very important: as I’ve discussed before, emotions can run very high when discussing how to categorize people, this is because so much more is at stake.

There’s a famous story about swans that Nasim Taleb used for the title of his recent book. European zoologists had seen swans, and all the swans they had seen had white feathers, so they said that all the swans in the world were in fact white. Then a European went to Australia and saw swans with black feathers.

Over the past few years I’ve realized that there are a lot of scientists who have a different view of science than I do, and most of them don’t even know about my way of thinking. But my way of thinking about science – Instrumentalism – is cool! I’m writing this post to explain what Instrumentalism is, and why I prefer it to other ways of thinking about science.

Earlier this year I talked about Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, which Rosch interpreted as radial categories. I’ve also talked about how categorization is used in arguments, with a layer of “category fight” superimposed on an underlying conflict, and often obscuring that underlying conflict. I’ve used this in class with my students when we’re studying semantics.

Dealbreaker’s Jon Shazar reassures us by excluding Green Cannabis from the category of “marijuana hedge fund,” contrary to its earlier inclusion by HedgeCo. It’s just a privately traded manufacturing company – of cookies and candy made with marijuana. But hedge funds might invest in it! It’s not clear where these would be sold.

Even if you didn’t grow up in a hippie town like I did, you may very well like to eat natural foods. If I weren’t allergic I would eat natural chicken; everyone says it’s healthy, right? Not so fast!

Last month I guessed that when Ari Wallach said that Hastings-on-Hudson is a village “in a Wittgensteinian sense,” he meant that it was part of a family of things that are called “villages,” but don’t all share the same set of criteria. Wallach confirmed on Twitter that this was what he meant.

This weekend the New York Times Styles section ran one of their periodic stories about kids growing up and moving to the suburbs, and changing both themselves and the suburbs in the process. A while back the suburb in question (more of an exurb) was Rosendale, and this time it was Hastings-on-Hudson.