Every so often I have an intense long-lasting dream that’s about linguistic analysis. The dream starts with something I recall (in the dream) as having read on the net but not yet responded to, and it absorbs my attention for a long time, working out the details. Until I fully wake up, it doesn’t occur to me that none of it makes any sense at all.
Last night the trigger was some (imagined) web report on a piece of software to detect British automobile plates that have taboo vocabulary on them — why does it never occur to me that these premisses are totally nutso? — and automatically change them to something innocuous.
As is usually the case, I’d gotten to my computer on awakening before realizing that all of it was will-of-the-wisps. It always is.
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