buckdata – news and views for an unquiet age

Serve and protect are noble words, suggesting nurturance and safety. They make me think of a good Mommy, or perhaps an excellent babysitter. However, as a motto, these two verbs exist in a kind of linguistic vacuum: They are profoundly ambiguous. Are they infinitives or commands? Ideals or marching orders? Further, both verbs are transitive. [...]

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In the age of instant messaging, trends in literature which have lain dormant since the telephone began to jangle are again awakened. Constrained by length limits of 140 characters, we turn for literary inspiration to the past–this time to the golden age of the telegraph–when users paid by the word and changed language by writing [...]

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