slash ⁽⁵⁾

Less obtuse uses of marks and cuts: The mark as a symbol beyond judgement that creates it: I mean what have the symbols ever done for us?

These thoughts follow from reading Caleb Everett’s 2017 book Numbers and the making of us : counting and the course of human cultures. It argues our ability to use numbers, however useful, is a happenstance affair. A use that composes our body’s limbs & digits with some need in environments varied and varying. Counting does not depend on any innate…

In 2023, the novelist Cormac McCarthy died. His first published work came out the year I was born. He wrote what I would call mainstream westerns & apocalypses. I’ve only read The Road. At the time there were some interviews with him re-floated, in which his low use of punctuation is given some air time, and how he got there.

This is part two, so if you are beginning… —maybe start over at Slash-and-blur worldculture part 1 which introduces the slash, the blur and the contronym as the main tools in a good worlding culture. The slash lists things into a chunk, and in chunking, it blurs… —while our attention finds another focus: a distraction, an urgency, a pot on the…

The simplest things have the most names The simplest things have the most names, as they can arise in more frameworks and their jargons. The named names then develop their own worlds of influence. The strike or score, a slash or scratch is, almost, the simplest mark. A dot or spot or peck is simpler, but less clearly an intentional…