Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Go Home, Dishwasher, You're Drunk

     A recent up-to-the-minute high-tech addition to the galley kitchen of Roseholme Cottage is a dry-erase board, upon which Tam and I make grocery lists and leave messages to one another.  Of course, when you have a channel of communications with any fuzziness to it, that ambiguity must be exploited:
     Which reminds me of the book I'm currently reading (on the recommendation of Sydney Padua), James Gleick's The Information.  I'm barely ten percent in and thoroughly engrossed; it is as if Henry Petroski had turned his talent to looking at how we look at language and, well, information.  He starts with "talking drums," about which, it turns out, nearly everything I thought I knew was wrong.

2 comments:

Cincinnatus said...

Is the clothes washer drunk too?

Windy Wilson said...

If you can find it, "Wordplay, What Happens when People Talk", by Peter Farb has, not only an interesting half page on African Talking Drums, but also on punning.