A central theme in the speculative writing on technology of the past century is that forms of technics, like forms of biological l...ife, undergo a process of evolution. With the passage of time, newer and more sophisticated varieties of apparatus, organization, and technique rise to replace older, simpler varieties. New technologies enter into areas of social existence where they had not been previously. Just as Darwin observes that the various species of life on the Galapagos Islands tend to specialize and diversify into particular biological niches, so it is that forms of technology continually spread into fresh areas of social utility. In both number and diversity the kinds of technical artifice available to human societies increase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think w...e mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype.... The separate languages of the Indo-European family were at one time, perhaps five thousand years ago, maybe much longer, a single language. The separation of the speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed by Darwin on various islands of the Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining enough resemblance to an original ancestor so that the family resemblance can still be seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, ...all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose--some for cash and some for "political influence." We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice.... We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. "Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the sorrow; shall it melt? Ah, water Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys... And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These women behind the store windows? Dreams, sir, dreams at bargain prices, a trip to the Indies! These people perfume themselves... with spices. You enter, they close the curtains, and the trip begins. The gods descend on the nude bodies and the islands drift, demented, with the tousled hair of palm trees in the breeze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had brought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land:... And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. "What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs! Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank" (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-- A perfect and absolute blank!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »