Describing the problems of electronic texts in her book Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Susan Hockey laconically observes that "There is no obvious unit of language" (2000: 20).
> Hockey is reflecting critically on the ordinary assumption that this unit is the **Word**. Language scholars know better. Words can be usefully broken down into more primitive parts and therefore understood as constructs of a second or even higher order. The view is not unlike the one continually encountered by physicists who search out basic units of matter.
In late 2023, I (Brian Marick) did a series of podcast episodes on ecological and embodied cognition. (Start here – EXCERPT: Concepts Without Categories podcast 
–, even though that episode is marked as optional. Note that all episodes have transcripts.) In the last episode, I identified “Illinois-style design”, which is biased toward creating data structures or classes that are faithful representations of the program’s domain. In iterative/incremental design, Illi
> This excerpt from episode 40 podcast contains material independent of that episode's topic (Collaborative Circles) that might be of interest to people who don't care about collaborative circles. It mostly discusses a claim, due to Andy Clark, that Words are not Labels for concepts. Rather, words come first and concepts accrete around them. As a resolute, concepts are messy. Which is fine, because they don't need to be tidy.