‘There is a long-standing myth that before the Enlightenment, all the experiences and behaviours we would now classify as madness were thought to be due to demonic possession.

This idea has been comprehensively debunked and it is now clear that both of these concepts have run side-by-side and medieval courts often went to great lengths to try and distinguish the two ‘states’.

I’ve just read a fascinating article about ‘Demonology, Neurology, and Medicine in Edwardian Britain’ from the Bulletin of the History of Medicine that showed that this tendency continued well into the modern age.’

‘ ‘Israel has banned all iPad imports — yes, that means even bringing one on business or vacation — over concerns that higher-powered wireless receivers and transmitters in the device may disrupt national networks.

‘The iPad will be device non grata in Israel until authorities certify that the computers comply with local standards. About 10 unlucky iPad owners have had the devices confiscated so far. Visitors see their devices held in custody — racking up fines — until they depart the country.

‘“If you operate equipment in a frequency band which is different from the others that operate on that frequency band, then there will be interference,” Nati Schubert, a senior deputy director for the Communications Ministry told AP. “We don’t care where people buy their equipment … but without regulation, you would have chaos.”

‘The problem is in the juice: the U.S. Federal Communications Commission allows Wi-Fi broadcasting at higher power levels than permitted in Europe and Israel. Concerns are that the stronger signal could consume too much bandwidth, or throw off other wireless connections.

‘Israel is the only country so far to officially ban imports although the report stated that many European countries have the same standards and could run into similar problems.’ (Cult of Mac)

‘It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)

Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).

The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful — there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language — and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal.

Namely, linguists have shown that spoken utterances — even by educated people (that is, even you) — average seven to ten words. We speak in little packets. And the result is much baggier than we think of language as being, because we live under the artificial circumstance of engaging language so much on the page, artificially enshrined, embellished, and planned out. That’s something only about 200 languages out of 6000 have been subjected to in any real way, and widespread literacy is a human condition only a few centuries old in most places.’ (The New Republic)