It takes listeners longer to determine what a word is—to understand c-a-t to be cat—when that word has lots of neighbors. That’s because when we hear a word, everything that sounds like that word becomes slightly more accessible in memory. With a large neighborhood at the ready, it is more difficult to eliminate the words that were not said; it’s harder to rule out the possibility that the talker said cut or kit or cot or cad or cap rather than cat. A word like gem, which has fewer neighbors than cat, is simply less confusable, and thus, all else being equal, requires less work to identify.
Jessica Love on word neighborhoods. Read.
The superrich make lousy neighbors— “SLUM LORDS”
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They’re never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of the superrich is absence.
They’re always demonstrating they can afford
to be somewhere else. Don’t let them in.
Their money is a kind of poverty.
by John Updike, Autumn 1998, The American Scholar
Source: luxuriousshit
