blanket_movement epitome of incomprehensibility E_o_i, External VP: All right (heaves a sigh). Define your term. E_o_i, Minister of the Interior or Inferior: Blanket movement! It’s when you move a word from a lower to a higher category of meaning! And it also carries connotations of fall, like pumpkin spice without pumpkins! Example. After today’s syntax class Brigita, Elly, Patrick, and I stood together; Patrick talked about wearing short sleeves in this weather and I said, “Not me—yesterday I wore one sweater and today I’m wearing two.” Patrick just nodded, but it was when I was on the way to the train that I realized I wasn’t, in fact, wearing ANY sweaters. “Sweater” has a particular definition. I was wearing a hoodie over a red corduroy suit jacket. Yesterday I wore my long black suit jacket, not a sweater either. So what happened? Just that my brain took “sweater” and applied it as a blanket term meaning “layers of clothing over one’s shirt that are relatively thin.” EEVP: We did that with “blanket” – as you probably will go on and on about. EMII: Eh, it’s just that I used to get very mad when my parents would tell me to call a sheet a sheet and nothing else. For me, sheet was a subcategory of blanket. Blanket: bed covering. Quilt: heavy blanket. Sheet: thin blanket. And when Mom and Dad questioned that, I felt they were questioning my intelligence. But you know how language change is driven by reanalysis… EEVP: You’re getting off topic. You were going to (checks notes) mention your novel? EMII: Well, there’s the part when Carol complains that her brother “won’t wear a hijab inside the Jewish church.” You see… EEVP: Yeah, I get it. “Hijab” as any religious head covering, “church” as any place of worship. Which one’s autobiographical, though? EMII: (hedges, like a hedge). Category errors in general. There’s a running joke that Carol mixes up religions… EEVP: The second, then. Christian-centric childhood. And you were always the mystical one – I was usually thinking about food. EMII: We were all thinking about food. And I’m not mystical. How is interiority inherently mystical? I was wondering just now – well, I’ll ask you – do you think the tendency towards category movement has any neuroscientific basis? EEVP: Ooh, big words. You’re about to talk about ADHD, I can tell. EMII: Well, I was thinking of Alzheimer’s, where there’s a documented tendency to forget specifics and refer to things by their larger categories, e.g., “that writing thing” instead of “that pen.” EEVP: You do that too. EMII: …All worries should be directed to the Anxiety Management Department. Okay, good, you’re not seriously worried about that. Yet. But DO you think that ADHD predisposes one to category errors? EEVP: We don’t know enough to figure that out. EMII: Who’s “we”? You, me, the wider neurolinguistics community? EEVP: What community? You think they all live in the same neighbourhood? Sleep in the same bed? EMII: Sometimes… Look, why ISN’T “blanket” a blanket term? It would be so elegant! (She cries tears of science edged with art. The art creates a filmy sheen, an iridescent high-quality ignorance. The Secretary of Ambition scribbles notes, but shakes her head at Interior’s nascent theories. After all, a colleague at the younger end of the millennial spectrum once used the word “paranoid” to mean “overly worried”; e_o_i had thought that was unique to herself. And there’s probably a word for this in Historical Linguistics…) “Broadening: A word’s set of meanings is expanded. Also known as widening or generalization.” Blanketing blanket? Blanket! I always blanketed so. 211110 ... unhinged i wake up in the middle of the night cold to find my blanket on the floor my dreams so hot i can't remember them so hot that i throw off the covers leave myself naked to the things that roam in the night a supine offering to the darkness 211111 ... tender_square (damn, this is sexy unhinged) 211111 ... nr if someone claimed that no blankets should ever be stationary, and people agreed and hopped on the bandwagon to move them... would that be a blanket blanket movement movement?  sigh. 211111 ... tender_square (nr, asking the important questions) 211111 ... nr but actually... there would have to be multiple blanket movements to make a blanket blanket movement a true movement. so others would also have to blindly follow in this person's footsteps and create their own movements for lack of blanket movement. (okayyyy, brain... let's go use you in more productive ways.) 211111 ... e_o_i That made me laugh out loud literally and my literal blanket movement is usually to the side. The quilt starts, the sheet follows. "No, you come back here." But they want to migrate. 211112 what's it to you? who go blather from