Noncompositional

Let’s talk about secrets, and more specifically, about revealing secrets. A secret is some piece of information known to some individual or group, which that group (or some subgroup of it) wants to remain unknown to those who do not know it. To keep a secret is to not tell any unknowing soul the information. To reveal a secret is to tell someone who doesn’t know the secret about it – or is it? Well, here are some possibilities:

• telling someone you know knows the information
• telling someone you know doesn’t know
• telling someone who you aren’t sure if they know

The last two are probably revealing a secret. The first might get you a reprimand (Don’t just go around babbling that to anyone! What if I hadn’t known…, for instance), or it might just be a normal activity. Depends on the secretive group.

Now, what would it mean to accidentally reveal the secret? (hint: see post title) Well, it probably means that you told the secret to someone who didn’t know the information carelessly, by a slip of the tongue, as it were. You may or may not have known that the person knew the information. And, importantly for this discussion, as soon as you realize that you uttered that information, you realize your error.

Ah, but there’s a whole other set of possibilities if we consider the possibility that you don’t realize that some piece of information is a secret. First possibility: your friend tells you some information intended to be a secret, but you figure it’s already common knowledge. Say your friend told you that she was going to join the Navy, and so you figure that this information is widely known, if not among her other friends than at least among her immediate family. But you’re in luck, because your friend hasn’t told anyone else yet (what a good friend you must be, then). So, you bring it up in conversation with her parents (So, now that your daughter is leaving college to join the Navy…), and only then, when the parents are {raging mad / unconscious on the floor / whatever}, do you realize your mistake. Your utterance of the secret was made perfectly intentionally, with specific goals in mind, though importantly you assumed it was common knowledge when you uttered it. The question is: did you do anything accidentally?

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The background images of the Relaxation theme I was using earlier had the annoying property of being rendered later than the text, which annoyed be. I don’t think the load times were bad at all, but it just looked bad when loading, to me anyway. So I’ve just been doing some experimentation with background-image-less themes, and while I was at it looked for liquid themes (i.e., those with non-fixed-width CSS styles, so it resized based on the size of the “viewer port” (browser window) and wasn’t mean to those with really large or small screen resolutions). You’re looking at the Steam theme (with some significant modifications). Anyone with any gripes about the theme (especially colors or font styles — I have horrible sense), let me know.

Bit of a change in the permalink structure. Instead of archive/yyyy/mm/dd/[post-name], it’s /yyyy/mm/[post-name]. Sorry for any broken links or feeds. I’m trying to redirect traffic appropriately, but stuff may not work for a bit.

[update: Old-style permalinks should now be redirected to the correct locations. And sorry to anyone who received a huge "backlog" of posts. I'm not sure if this is due to the permalink structure change or the redirecting procedure I implemented (basically a mod_rewrite command in the .htaccess file). If anyone who happens to read this knows if this will be a problem, or if you just want to complain about what I just apologized for, drop a line (rleegold at google's mail service).]

…yet another linguablog is created. It will continue to bear the name Every Way but One, which means I need to think of another name for my livejournal blog. In any case, my goal with this place is to record my thoughts on (mostly) linguistic matters, perhaps track my progress through graduate school, and in general just try something different.

Content to come.