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A professor of mine posited that most every sentence ever spoken or written had never before been communicated. There was some compelling math behind it, and some compelling reason it was mentioned, but I still find it dubious.
Your professor massively underestimates how much of what I say is movie references.
He probably assumed the sentence selection to be a statistically independent process, which it is not.
but “most” only needs to be 50% of sentences, and if you include puncutation, tone, context, speed, accent, cadence, pauses, pitch, volume, intent, method/medium, background noise…
For “written”, most of those don’t apply though.
“Hello, how are you?” has been repeated plenty. But after that things start to vary.
In the sequence of numbers 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9… Most numbers only appear once even though most numbers are a repeat.
- There are 9 possible numbers and most (88%) of them are not repeats
- “1” accounts for most (60%) of the entries in the sequence.
If we assume “hi, how are you?” is “1” and most sentences are another number, we can see how even with common phrases being repeated frequently, most sentences may tend to be original.
(I’ve not done the math and I’ve definitely not studied language enough to say how dubious or accurate the claim is, you just piqued my interest and I started trying to rationalize it all)
Obviously some template phrases are repeated a lot, but those are not the majority of sentences. Consider talking to someone on the phone for 20 minutes. You have the customary greetings that take maybe 30 seconds along with your farewell in the last 30 seconds, then you have the next 19 minutes of actual conversation where you exchange information. The conversation would not need to last for 20 minutes if you were just repeating the same phrases over and over again.
When they say repeated, they mean repeated for all time ever. Has someone ever used the phrase “how are you today?” … yes. Has someone ever used the phrase “Pablo Picasso is my favorite brand of watermelon” before? Probably not. There are probably a lot of phrases with varying levels of “have existed before”. That previous sentence might be an entirely original one.
But there are plenty of other sentences that can be conveyed that actually exchange information but don’t generate new sentences. “So, what do you do for work?” “My favorite color is green” are almost certainly not new sentences.
A better breakdown of my sequence of numbers with the exact same values might be
1, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 4, 5, 1, 1, 6, 7, 1, 1, 8, 9 1, 1, 1, 1, 1And now you have a repeated intro section per line and a sequence of totally unique numbers to that line.
“Most numbers are repeated” could mean that if you pick any given number from all the 21 numbers, it more than 50% likely to be a “1” you pick, just because 1 shows up so often.
“Most numbers are NOT repeated” could mean that if you if you pick any given number from the 9 unique numbers that show up in the set, you are 88% likely to pick a number that only exists once. But if any of these numbers were to be repeated even once, for any reason, that part stops being true.
In language, this just means that some phrases are going to be purely templates like “Hello” but some phrases are informational without being new: “I like turtles” and some are completely never happened before.
And depending on where your mental anchoring is, “we have a lot of repeated phrases in our lives, how could MOST sentences be new” or “repeating things would get old” … that stat may be hard to believe or surprising, or very obvious.
At the same time the infinite monkeys with typewriters are also writing novels about it
Ok buddy
can someone explain the image in context to the original post to me?
Edit:
- [X] Image explainedthanks @Tehnund
- [X] Text explainedthanks @Lena
- [X] Image in context to Text explainedthanks @JankatarchThe long-distance relationship mostly conducted via text was going smooth but then it suddenly ended in a rough way as if wind from the video blew it over due to some TikTok direct messages.
Might have just been an AI the entire time, data-mining you for their future romance bots.
Oh! Nice analogy, thanks!
Woah she was hydroplaning, not a damn scratch on her!
The long-distance relationship, which was mostly conducted via text (so they haven’t met in real life), came to an end due to some TikTok direct messages.
“Image in context to Text”: Cause both situations are unexpected and unpleasant.
We have collected all the
infinity stonesexplanationsBut they are then ultimately unrelated to each other? The image could have been a poop emoji and the post would have conveyed the same message?
Does anyone else wonder wtf is going on in the video?
