Linguistic Drift Quotes

“For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists’ view of nature.

It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary.

And then, when it was made simple, distilled, counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“The Uncultured Poet (A Sonnet)

There is a reason I never translate my works,
You can translate information but not sentiment.
So I carve humanity with not one but many tongues,
Yet due to alphabetical wall, much remain unspoken.
Human and culture must grow together in harmony,
All traditions of stagnation must be thrown away.
If a human can come forward across conditioning,
Why can't a culture do the same and meet halfway!
I sacrificed my language so I could feel you better,
Now I can't read the tongue of Tagore I was raised in.
Such an uncultured poet whose culture is the world,
Asks the cultures with borders just one little thing.
Take some lessons from Mustafa Kemal in modernizing.
A culture is enhanced, not diminished, by latinizing.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans