Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.
You’re looking at the future. People translated as data.
Data: “Oh, shit.”
We’ll beat you yet, you cold-blooded, censored son of a bowdlerized, unprintably expurgated deletion!
"Words are funny. Damn used to be a technical term in theology, if you want to look at it that way.” “I know, but they sound funny. When you start saying bleep and censored, it ruins your masculine image.”
Starbuck: You sure they’ll fly?
Tyrol: Well, the reactor’s still hot, so all we have to do is pull the rad buffers from the engine, refuel it, load the ordnance, and you’re ready to go. The biggest problem is getting them over to the port launch bay.
Starbuck: Why can’t we use the starboard launch?
Tyrol: It’s a gift shop now.
Starbuck: Frak me.
The needler’s beam lanced forward at full strength. The leaf dropped off and the tree went mad. Jepson fell twenty-five feet at the incredible rate of two vulgar adjectives per foot.
No barracks-room language, if you please.
“You must be Bonzo, then?” Ender asked, pronouncing the name correctly.
“No, just a brilliant and talented polyglot. Petra Arkanian. The only girl in Salamander Army. With more balls than anybody else in the room.”
If only I could live in the heart of the city and the stars would nevertheless mostly be visible.
In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flickered into reality.
By ten o’clock there was only a scattering of pedestrians standing with their noses pressed against the towering plate-glass windows of the Manhattan Terminal. A nattily-dressed young man waved at them from a platform, stepped through a transmitter, and emerged on another platform eighty feet away, still waving. He moved six feet sideways, stepped through a second transmitting setup, and returned to his starting place.
The average New Yorker watched for three minutes, failed to figure out the gag, and went on his way grumbling.Then a Universal Trans employee with a genius for promotion plucked a shapely brunette from her seat behind a ticket window, sent out for a bathing suit, and set the young man to chasing her from platform to platform. Within minutes the most colossal traffic jam in the entire history of Manhattan was under way.
Whaddaya think? A fly. Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I’m becoming something that never existed before. I’m becoming… Brundlefly. Don’t you think that’s worth a Nobel Prize or two?
A horsefly can’t do a horse much damage, but it can drive it wild anyway.
The horse, joyful and relieved, thanked the man, and said: ‘Now that our enemy is dead, remove your bridle and saddle and restore my freedom.’ “Whereupon the man laughed loudly and replied, ‘Never!’ and applied the spurs with a will.
There’s your conditioning again; glorifying and romanticizing primitive animalism. Sure you consider that we are superior to the animals?
“No!” he screamed and started forward. “Oh, no! We’re civilized. We’re
intelligent!” He was pulled back, as in his terror he tried to leap from
the platform to get at the humanoids.
Held there, unable to move, he read the meaning of the actions of the
group hovering near the ship. One flashed a shining tentacle around, as
if to point to the stadium, the pitifully small spaceship on display,
the crowds of people.
The leader manifestly ignored him. He flowed forward a pace, his ovoid
head held high in pride and arrogance. He pointed a tentacle toward the
south end of the stadium, and a pillar of leaping flame arose; fed with
no fuel, never to cease its fire, the symbol of possession.
He pointed his tentacles to the north, the south, the east, the west. He
motioned with his tentacles, as if to encircle all of Earth.
He unfurled a scroll and began to read.
Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Call that job satisfaction? I don’t.
“Every robot needs a control system or else–”
“Or else it’s out of control?”
Siegfried: How do I know you’re not Control?
Maxwell Smart: If I were Control, you’d already be dead.
Siegfried: If you were Control, you’d already be dead.
Maxwell Smart: Neither of us is dead, so I am obviously not from Control.
Shtarker: That actually makes sense.