#verbage

Hello, peachy anon. First of all, I would like to sincerely apologize if I have offended you in any way with my choice of vocabulary. And for you, I have changed the verbage.

However, I can assure you that no offence was meant in writing that piece, or naming it as such. On the contrary, I meant the exact opposite. I have always thought that darker skinned women were absolutely stunning. They just glow, and they’re some of the most beautiful women. To me, the term “Exotic” is not dehumanizing, as it means ‘from a distant land, or place’, and with that, I mean distant from me. Wondrous places like Tahiti, Egypt, Haiti, Barbados, Trinidad, Armenia, etc.–and I could go on. Gorgeous, idealized places that seem almost mythological, despite their modern cradle. 

As for the piece, I had a handful of beautiful women of melanin skin read it before I posted it, and not one of them said it was offensive in any way. They all said it was lovely, and very empowering. I had nothing but good intentions in writing it, and again, I am very sorry if it came across in any ill light. I would never want to offend anyone, especially with my writing. 

But as for fetishizing, literally anything in the world can be a fetish, so it’s hard to say that anything isn’t fetishizing. One could even say that writing any of this is fetishizing not only Asians, but idols in general. The argument is one that can never be won, and would never end, so I will not start it here. I am merely commenting on the predicament we face when it comes to doing any of this.

Thank you so much for enjoying my work, and I will try hard in the future to not offend anyone further. Hwaiting~

Verbage vs Information

Information in programming languages is anything that is useful the the assembler or compiler that would eventually turn into code.

Verbage is stuff that is useful only to the programmer. The assembler or compiler would throw it away because its useless to the machine.

🤔 I would say the most obvious form of verbage would be comments. Identifier names are more subtle but crucial form of verbage. People need the words. Machines only care about numbers.

In the figure above. On the left with have a set of example identifiers. We label our variables and functions because that is the only way we can identify information. On the right would be a representation of what the machine finds useful. It has no need for names. In reality it only cares about memory addresses.

Verbage hasn't been a topic of concern in computer science. But its something I had to pay attention when trying to design graphical code constructs. A graphical representation of an identifier is an icon. Unfortunately an icon takes a long time to draw relative to typing a word. In spite of that I found icons necessary. I am thinking as we get into creating higher level constructs we might need to look more closely at the science of verbage. (note: in the future AI will come in handy in drawing icons for us. 🙂)

Good language design aims to minimize verbage. For example in Pascal, it uses keywords for operators such as AND, NOT, OR, XOR, BEGIN, END, etc. The C language uses symbols, &&, !, ||, ^, {, }, etc. The C language approach seems to be preferred even thou keywords have clearer meaning. The Cobol language used a lot of verbage and it just didn't take off.

Although a minimal amount of verbage is preferred there is no way to get rid of verbage in identifier names because that is just the way we think. Some programmers promote long wordy identifiers because its a kind of self documenting code. Other programmers promote short mnemonic identifiers because their code is more compact and they take less time to type.

I sat behind a guy on the train.

Thought it was you

But he didn't say hi so I didn't either.

It was weird.

He had this warmth.

From his body, yeah,

But it was all around him.

Soft

Gentle

An unknown body of water protected by large rocks.

I positioned my chest to fit his back.

I wondered at how our bodies fit together.

How they melded together like the great dunes of the Sahara

As is our way, I rode the train past my stop.

Stayed on until 188th Street.

Sixty plus extra blocks to sit with a known stranger.

I walked along the train as it sped away.

Where was the man going?

Some people don't have to use words.

The right wing haters ruined that with their “woke mind virus” bullshit.

Woke used to mean, awake, aware. Now it’s whatever they hate.