music, language, life and leftovers

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music, language, life and leftovers

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October 3, 2005

knowns and unknowns

rumsfeld.jpg

One of the students brought in Donald Rumsfeld’s famous ‘rum remarks’ about ‘knowns and unknowns’ today.

I think we decided that it was gobbledygook mainly because of the processing load and the fact that it was a tautology with no interesting effects that also failed to answer a direct question.

Funnily enough, we then looked at some ‘unknown knowns’, i.e. things about language that speakers know but don’t know they know (like when to aspirate a /p/)

B-)

Posted by Billy at October 3, 2005 5:13 PM

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