This page is mainly for links to the following pages that don’t fit anywhere else. They aren’t Ethnolinguistic Notes and don’t fit comfortably or at all in the Human Predicament series or on my personal page.

Why write unpublishable things?

Modest proposals and (probably) other such things

Quotations from my office door

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Linguistic Quotations

-----	-----	The assumption that language consists of languages
-----	-----	The assumption that languages like English are "natural" languages

Trying to keep up with the language

After I decided that my Web site should include something beyond the Ethnolinguistic Notes, and not long after I started my personal page, I decided it might be a good idea to attempt to explain what led me to start writing unpublishable Notes in the first place and to continue doing so even today. Thence, the "Why write unpublishable things?" page.

Not long after this, I added "The Human Predicament", but this has grown enough to have its own link separate from the Odds and Ends.

Later still, I started a new section entitled, "Modest proposals and (probably) other such things" with "A proposal for reforming the way we fill elective offices".

I'm not sure about the relative chronology here, but probably in late 1997 I began posting quotations on my office door. Then (probably 16 February 1998) I began posting the same quotations on the website in order to make them more generally and more permanently available. I initially just posted a page entitled “Quotations from my office door". Later, realizing that these quotations were in a pretty random order, I decided that organizing selected quotations onto some kind of order would make the points more effectively. That led to another page, entitled simply, "Linguistic Quotations" that was intended to introduce subsequent notes that would contain grouped sets of selected quotations.

" "Linguistic Quotations" is an attempt to select quotations from the original set, and group them in such a way as to show how a number can be seen as focusing on a common theme. It explains that I think the quotations serve to throw light on false assumptions.

Subsequently, I completed two of these pages of quotations devoted each to one particular point: One is entitled "The Assumption that Language Consists of Languages"; the other, "The Assumption that Languages like English are "Natural" Languages".

Now, I've added one further page. It's inspired by the experience that seems more and more frequent for those of us who've lived past out times--that of changes in the language, or at least in usage, that we're inclined to disapprove of. I've entitled this one: "Trying to keep up with the language".

First put on the Web on 18 December 2002
Updated 31 May 2003