Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

SPOILERS WARNING! In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a story titled The Secret Miracle which I find particularly stimulating. The plot is centered on a writer who was sentenced to death. At the night before his execution, he begged God to grant him one more year of life so that he could finish writing an important piece of work. The next day, at the moment just before the bullet hit him, time suddenly stopped. From the writer’s point of view, all activities in the physical world had been frozen - the bullet remained stationary in the air, his body unmovable.

In the 70’s, it was fashionable for intellectuals to abuse the term “grammar” to refer to any underlying principles. In one of his essays, Italo Calvino used the term “the grammar of tree” to refer to…. essentially developmental plant biology. I thought that was pretentious. But heh, in R programming, people are talking about the grammar of graphics and grammar of data manipulation again. It’s fashionable to call functions “verbs” again. Hello, structuralism! (PS: A philosopher friend informed me that this abuse of the word grammar started with Wittgenstein)