
Words about worlds



Shells of anomiidae, also called mermaid’s toenails, jingle shells, saddle oysters. Lovely, paper-thin, luminescent treasures, they washed up in great quantities on the beach at the end of Annawamscutt Road. I went and collected hundreds of them whenever the tide was out, poured them into jelly jars, and gave them to friends who lived far from the ocean. I was always curious about why they all looked so different, and then I found out their shapes are determined by the shape of the object they grow on. They are the negative cast of whatever is on the seafloor, a random collection of what happens to be down there — rocks, other shells, sunken timbers, old moorings. Thus the alpha privative, the starting “a-” to indicate negation, or absence, of “nomos,” law. There is no law to this order of creature. It forms itself to the world, wrapped around its surround. Cut it loose from that context, and you have anomie, as Emile Durkheim once taught us, so very long ago.
Hail
Houses sliding into rivers
Lightning strikes
Muddy floods
Sandstorms
Tornadoes
Calving glaciers
Avalanches
Cats in trees
Wet birds
Tsunamis
Falling rocks
Volcanos
Collapsing towers
Sunspots
Drowning dogs
Trapped goats
Pigs in bulldozer buckets
Wildfires
Horses in gullies
Turtles on their backs
A bacillus lives in a world, or on the borders of a world, far other than our own, and preconceptions drawn from our experience are not valid there.
–D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, 44
bastard
dog
clown
joker
skunk
creep
idiot
rat
snake
beast
moron
brute
brat
villain
heel
swine
fool
scumbag
boor
schmuck
louse
toad
cad
bugger
scum
nuisance
so-and-so
bounder
lout
stinker
rotter
pill
reptile
slob
hound
buzzard
cur
dirtbag
bleeder
varmint
vermin
slimeball
cretin
sleazebag
blighter
sleazeball
slime
barbarian
son of a gun
churl
sod
nerd
crud
fink
sleaze
crumb
scuzzball
savage
stinkard
chuff
loudmouth
rat fink
wretch
scoundrel
rogue
caveman
jackass
scab
dolt
oaf
lowlife
vulgarian
imbecile
scamp
roughneck
miscreant
Neanderthal
blockhead
turkey
snob
dork
ninny
booby
dope
goon
doofus
airhead
pest
insolent
nut
nincompoop
snot
schmoe
nitwit
schmo
dink
dweeb
snip
nit
half-wit
snoot
birdbrain
Whereas no temperature settings are required for humans, who can actually be creative and accurate at the same time.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)
https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-hallucination
https://www.lighton.ai/blog/llm-glossary-6/turning-up-the-heat-the-role-of-temperature-in-generative-ai-49
https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/eliza-effect

So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever persons the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become. Nothing had been so hateful in the sight of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tried to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds ‘bloodthirsty simpletons.’
–Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1959.