To play around with this concept, I'm going to use the following languages, chosen because I have enough familiarity with these languages to be dangerous:

1. English. My native language. (American English, I'm from America.)
2. Latin. My first linguistic love.
3. Tagalog. I spoke it at a near-native level for two years.
4. Toki Pona. A new love and the only constructed language in this list. When discussing word order I'm going to identify the roles each word plays in the following way:

• The Actor is a noun that is performing the action of the sentence.
• The Location is where the sentence is happening. This is also where an indirect object would fit, but we'll call it the Location for now.
• The Object is a noun that is having its state changed in the sentence.
• The Verb is the action being performed.

So let's use a very simple sentence:

The girl gives the rose to the boy.

Now lets split that out into the linguistic parts of speech in each language:

For most languages various particles and/or articles are needed to make the sentence work:

note that in toki pona two words are being used to translate “rose”. As a language with only 200-ish words, most English nouns become noun phrases in toki pona.

Role Assignment

In a sentence, how do you identify the role each word is playing? The verb is generally fairly obvious, as it's an entirely different part of speech. But what about the three nouns?

English

In English, word order is used in conjunction with particles. In the sentence above “to” identifies the location of the sentence. The article “the” is used to emphasize that we are talking about one specific girl and one specific rose and one specific boy. Swapping out “a” for “the” in any of these phrases changes the sentence subtly, but noticeably:

The girl gives the rose to a boy.

indicates that we aren't really concerned with the identity of the boy. She could have given it to Juan, Michael, or Ncuti, we're really focused on the girl and the giving of a specific rose. Maybe she's on a stupid show like The Bachelorette and giving the rose indicates a choice she has made.

The girl gives a rose to the boy.

Suggests that roses are effectively a commodity, all roses are created equal, this just happens to be one out of a set of roses. We care about the girl and the boy, the rose is just lucky to have been chosen for this transaction.

A girl gives a rose to a boy.

Sounds like we are just stating a fact about how humans behave.

Latin

In Latin the case of the noun identifies the role of the noun. Latin cases are expressed as inflections on the noun stem. Put another way, the ending of each noun identifies its case. In our sentence above the word puella, puellæ is in the nominative, rosa, rosæ is conjugated in the accusative as rosam, and puer, pueri is conjugated in the dative as puero.

Tagalog

In Tagalog there is a concept of “focus, out of focus, location” identified by the use of the particles “ang, ng, & sa”. These concepts don't directly exist in English. But the conjugation of the verb tells you which of these foci is the actor of the sentence. the verb “bigay” has been conjugated in the present “ng” as “ibinibigay”, so we know that the actor is “out of focus” and we put the particle ng before the noun dalaga. Because we used this conjugation, rosas is the “focus” of the sentence (it has the particle ang before it) which tells us which word in the sentence is the most important. Lalaki is put in the sa position, identifying them as the location (or indirect object) of the sentence. To put the focus on the dalaga we would conjugate the verb differently. We could conjugate it in a third form to put the focus on the lalaki like so:

Bumibigay ang dalaga ng rosas sa lalaki. Binigyan ng dalaga ng rosas ang lalaki.

But both of those sentences are weird. The second one has connotations that are hard to express in English, but it would kind of feel like you are trying to hype up dalaga, focusing a sentence on her in a way that is unnatural. You would probably never use the third one, even in poetry. I'm honestly not even sure that one is correct.

Toki Pona

Toki Pona uses word order and the particles li and e to identify the role of each noun. The Actor in a Toki Pona sentence is the first word (unless you use a prepositional la phrase), followed by li which indicates that we are looking at the main verb. The Object comes right after the verb, and the Location is identified by the e particle before it.

Toki Pona is a deliberately constructed language with a deliberately simple syntax. There is no verb conjugation nor noun declension.

Usual Word Order

Each language has a common word order. Using the initials of each role:

• Actor
• Location
• Object
• Verb

They look like this:

• English: AVOL
• Latin: AOLV
• Tagalog: VAOL
• toki pona: AVOL

Can you change the word order and still have the sentence make sense?

English

Only to an extent.

• “To the boy the girl gives the rose.” is “poetic”.
• “The rose the girl gives to the boy...” becomes a noun phrase that identifies a specific rose, not a complete sentence in it own right.
• “The boy the girl gives the rose to...” is considered ungrammatical because of the dangling participle, and is again a phrase (this time identifying a specific boy), not a sentence.
• “The rose the girl the boy gives to.” is nonsense, and
• “The rose gives the girl to the boy.” is a sentence but one that belongs in a weird sci-fi movie where plants give people to other people. The meaning of the original is totally lost in this word order.

Latin

Totally. All day long. The word order gives us a sense of how important each word is in the sentence. Generally the first and last word are the most important, but all of these sentences are correct:

Puella rosam puero dat. Rosam puella puero dat. Puero rosam puella dat.

even >Dat puella rosam puero.

The point is that not only are all these sentences correct, they all mean the same thing. There might be a slight shift in emphasis, but most likely you chose an alternate word order to make the sentence scan correctly in a poem.

Tagalog

Not really. VAOL is pretty inviolate, but you can use the particle ay to move the actor before the verb:

Ang dalaga ay bumibigay ng rosas sa lalaki.

This sentence doubly emphasizes the dalaga as the most important part of the sentence. It's grammatical, but it has connotations that make it kinda funny in the context of the language. Messing around with the word order further, even with the ang ng sa particles identifying roles, is weird.

Ibinibigay ang rosas ng dalaga sa lalaki.

parses but just barely, while

Ibinibigay sa lalaki ng dalaga ang rosas.

sounds like you're having a stroke. Or singing a song. A very bad song.

Toki Pona

Nope. “actor li verb object e location” is built into the language. You can't put the e location phrase before the li verb phrase. The location of the object as the next word after the verb is critical to the sentence being parsed correctly.

Is there a point to all of this?

No, not really. I just enjoy “armchair linguistics” and thought I would share. 😃

A person discovered [random world-changing good thing] but scientists agreed to cover it up.

And as much fun as conspiracy theories are, this one makes it impossible for me to suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it. The problem is in the following two words:

scientists agreed.

No they didn't. This posits that all of academia set aside a core aspect of their very nature to cover up some specific fact. The heart and soul of research is arguing. Convincing the entire “scientific community” to hide something beggars the imagination.

This isn't to say that research doesn't get buried for unethical reasons. It does! All the time! But not because all of “science” agreed to cover it up. If you're going to create a conspiracy about academic malfeasance, go with a more likely scenario. Here are some for your perusal:

Likely ways to Bury Research

Doctor F discovered a great new thing, but:

• The Chair/Dean/Provost/President of the University cancelled the project.
• Their funding was pulled and given to a project with military application.
• The results were entangled in a battle over Intellectual Property/Patent rights
• Someone on the peer review committee had a grudge against them and stonewalled the results from ever being published.
• Their research methodology was called into question and the project was discredited.
• A rival researcher found a previous paper that had a similar basis to Doctor F's work, thus tainting the research with the stain of plagiarism.
• A rival researcher found a previous paper that seems to disprove the basis of Doctor F's work, thus discrediting all the new work.
• Doctor F sold their research to a private entity/government/military group, who had them sign a non-disclosure agreement, but then lost interest in the project.

Try one of these and your “hidden research” conspiracy theory will not only hold (slightly) more water, but will be more entertaining to boot.

• King Arthur
• Julius Caesar
• Merlin
• George Washington
• Achilles

All reside in roughly the same place in my brain. I know that two of those people are “definitely” real people, two of them are “definitely” fake, and one is maybe somewhere in the middle, but, eh. They're all just stories at this point.

I'm not crazy; if someone asked me “was Merlin a real person?” I'll say no. But honestly I think our modern perceptions of Caesar and even Washington bear very little resemblance to who those people actually were. And I think the “made up” people on this were probably also based on a real person originally, but at this point we've lost that connection so we say that they are nothing but a story.

And maybe this is the real confession, but I don't care. I don't care how “accurate” my view of Washington is. There are things I can learn from the stories we have about him. Someday I might want to read up on Caesar or Washington, but it's equally likely I'll want to read up on Achilles. And I believe I could learn something useful from studying any of those three people (even if one of them might never have been a person). But what is more interesting to me is how they are seen in the modern day, and the import that is attached to each of them as a touchstone for day to day life right now.

Anxiety is a natural reaction to the world around us right now. A sense that we need to be on alert that the threats are unknown but looming, and we can stave them off, perhaps, if we are but watching.

But what Anxiety really does to you is tie up your senses, congest your mind with nothing but itself. it's a prison itself, not freedom from one.

I hate sleep. Seriously, it sucks.

Why are we built such that we have to spend a third of our lives doing nothing? And not even the fun kind of doing nothing, like playing games or reading or meditating. Just literally shutting our huge brains down so biological janitors can wander through our synapses, cleaning out the gunk that accumulates because our brains are hastily slapped together and can't run properly without daily maintenance. Maybe another few million years of evolution will take care of that for us. And it confuses me when people say that they love sleeping. How do you know? You're asleep! For all you know sleep is hideous torture that you just forget about when you wake up. But if you do love sleep, What are the upsides you're seeing that I'm not? The few times I've actually asked this question I've gotten responses like the following:

1. Dreams are good
2. I feel better when I wake up
3. It's refreshing!

And these are all patently wrong. I realize I'm stating a subjective opinion as if it were objective fact, but it's my blog, I have decreed that I'm allowed to do that. Now that I have set up three straw man opinions, allow me to knock them down.

First off: Dreams. If you are one of those people who has good dreams, the kind where you can fly and eat any food you like, then you get a pass. I am not one of those people. 90% of the dreams I remember are audio only. Just two or more voices, talking in a black void, like an internal podcast. The other ten percent are high-production-value stress factories. I will have beautifully rendered dreams of a tidal wave that destroys a city, or a fire that burns down an entire neighborhood block. I have never flown free in my dreams, I can't eat, read, code, or write in my dreams, because the part of my brain that handles those things is asleep.

The dreams I don't remember are a vast well of residual stress over literally nothing. Something bad happened in my subconscious while I was unconscious. Why should I feel stress over this? And yes I know it's because it's because I'm feeling stress in my waking life, but this feels like I'm getting hit by it coming and going.

Second: Feeling better when you wake up. How? If I've slept for more than five hours I wake up dehydrated, possibly hungry, and stiff. It's like I was dead for a while and decided to stop being dead. Now I gotta un-mummify myself before I can do anything useful.

Which leads to point three: “Sleep is refreshing!” No the heck it is not. The best I can say for sleep is “when I get enough sleep I'm slightly less insane, because the glymphatic system janitors cleaned up my brain sufficient that I can think again” but I still maintain this is a design flaw.

The One Good Kind of Sleep

Is the nap. Naps rock. I find a comfy spot, lay back for a bit, relax, force myself to do nothing but listen to the sound of the world around me...and twenty to thirty minutes later, I go on with my day. I'm not a dehydrated monster, I'm not stiff or sore, I haven't wasted hours. If there were a way to subsist only on naps I would do so, but sadly the research is against this lifestyle. Both actual research, and my experience during my post-grad education.

If someone would invent a pill, or an mRNA shot, or genetic therapy that would allow me to never sleep again in exchange for becoming, say, 10% stupider, because my brain was doing maintenance while I was awake, I would take that deal in a heartbeat, and consider it a good trade. 10% dumber always is better than 100% dumber 33% of the time.

Of course I'm only speaking to my own world, my own surroundings. I am in no position to speak about anyone else's. But from where I stand, this is that season, the season of endings and departures.

My best friend of many many years is moving to the extreme other side of the country and that hurts. The odd thing of this world is that his moving away might mean we spend more time together, as we will most likely be awake early in the day an spend time online. But this does mean we won't see each other in person as I had hoped, when “All of this” ended. If it is ending.

My direct supervisor is leaving, and in his wake I'm being drawn into new opportunities. In the five years we've worked together he and I have never connected on any recognizably human level, but this means a sea change in our organization, one that has been changing a lot for a group that is traditionally quite stable. One of our developers quit rather suddenly, and another announced that they're leaving for a different job. We had to let one person go and we're hiring new people into new roles to replace these people we're losing.

Oh, and one member of our team died a few months ago. Not of COVID, oddly enough. Somehow that has been buried and forgotten, as if we can only hold so many earth-shattering changes and older ones must be cleared away to make room for the new ones. But I don't feel, in my heart of hearts, that I've actually recovered from that yet. How could we have done so?

So here's what I'm telling myself:

It's okay to hurt in times like this. I don't know what the future will bring. I don't know how to think about the future at all. My world is opening up again, more change is possible again, more freedom is possible, and we can hopefully all stop going individually crazy because we will be spending more time in heterogeneous groups. We'll get out of our bubbles and echo chambers and actually interact with one another. But we are still in pain, still suffering from the losses we've all suffered, are still suffering, both pandemic related and those that are simply pandemic-adjacent.

It's okay to hurt. Even those of us who follow a faith that teaches an Atonement and Resurrection still cry at funerals. That pain is not evil. Nor is it wrong to hurt when a good situation, like a good work team, comes to an end.

That's the way of it, I suppose. Change happens how and when it will, and we adjust. And adjust. and adjust again. It's okay.

Good friendships last. Even though hard times, especially through hard times. The hard and scary part of the liminal spaces is that we can't see the next thing; we don't know what good is coming. We only see the good that we're losing.

But deep down we know that most changes are for the better, or hold within them the key that will unlock our ability to do or be better. It takes patience to know that I guess.

For now my heart hurts. But it won't hurt forever.

But in those hours when the house is quiet, I'm free. Nobody has any demands of me. I can watch what I want, read what I want, eat, even go for a walk around the neighborhood without much real risk of seeing any neighbors. The next day, when I try to work, I'll pay for it. I'll be tired, my head full of static far louder than normal. At some point the ability to sleep will return and those broken systems will reassert themselves, but wrong. Sleeping during the day means I'm likely to be up all night again, so I have to try to stay awake and sleep at the right time. The price is too high.

Us