What doesn’t kill you gives you EXP

 This following passage is not from a novel, but rather a scientific paper I read recently. I hope it's still close enough to the topic. Secondly, as  Cowie (2008)  points out, the acquisition of grammar is not the only area where we have to acquire knowledge about what is not permissible without the benefit of negative evidence. We face exactly the same problem in lexical learning and learning from experience generally: few people have been explicitly told that custard is not ice-cream, and yet somehow they manage to learn this. Related to this, children do make overgeneralization errors—including morphological overgeneralizations like  bringed  and  gooder  and overgeneralizations of various sentence level constructions (e.g.,  I said her no ,  She giggled me ), and they do recover from them (cf.  Bowerman, 1988 ). Thus, the question isn’t “What sort of innate constraints must we assume to prevent children from overgeneralizing?” but r...

       One of the aspects of poetry that my classmates mentioned that they disliked was its indirectness. Why don't [poets] just say what they mean?" they ask.     In this blog post, I hope to explain why this viewpoint is utterly inane, nonsensical, and foolish.      …     What? I said what I meant. What's the issue here?     But that's clearly not what's meant by "say what you mean," right? Or is it?     Think about it. Are people always direct? Do they say exactly what they mean, all the time? Obviously not. Maybe it could be argued that society would be better off if we were all completely honest, but that's besides the point. We have to look beyond just the words in our conversations. We must consider tone, context, relationships, and personality when thinking about what someone is saying. Kind of like analyzing a poem, or literature in general.     But putting real life aside, losing ambiguity in ...