One day Einstein was asked by a pesky reporter to describe his theory of relativity in a few simple words. He responded with the following story:

“A man was asked by a blind man to describe the color white. The man said, ‘White is the color of a swan.’ The blind man said, ‘What is a swan?’ The man said, ‘A swan is a bird with a crooked neck.’

“The blind man asked, ‘What is crooked?’ The man was becoming impatient. He grabbed the blind man’s arm, straightened it and said, ‘This is straight.’ Then he bent it and said, ‘And this is crooked.’

“Whereupon the blind man quickly said, ‘Yes, yes, thank you. Now I know what white is.’”

So there’s the first clue why I could never find this story online — I had thought it was one of John Cage’s zen stories, but it’s actually a story told by Einstein. This in itself is a good illustration of the fallibility of memory. Here is another version I just found, and this fits the pattern of all the references I found to this story:

Einstein and his blindfriend. This story shows how complex Einstein could be. Not long after his arrival in Princeton he was invited, by the wife of one of the professors of mathematics at Princeton, to be guest of honor at a tea.-Reluctantly, Einstein consented. After the tea had progressed for a time, the excited hostess, thrilled to have such an eminent guest of honor, fluttered out into the center of activity and with raised arms silenced the group. Bubbling out some words expressing her thrill and pleasure, she turned to Einstein and said: “I wonder, Dr. Einstein, if you would be so kind as to explain to my guests in a few words, just what is relativity theory ? ”

Without any hesitation Einstein rose to his feet and told a story. He said he was reminded of a walk he one day had with his blind friend. The day was hot and he turned to the blind friend and said, “I wish I had a glass of milk.”

“Glass,” replied the blind friend, “I know what that is. But what do you mean by milk?”

“Why, milk is a white fluid,” explained Einstein.

“Now fluid, I know what that is,” said the blind man. “but what is white ? ”

” Oh, white is the color of a swan’s feathers.”

” Feathers, now I know what they are, but what is a swan ? ”

“A swan is a bird with a crooked neck.”

” Neck, I know what that is, but what do you mean by crooked ? ”

At this point Einstein said he lost his patience. He seized his blind friend’s arm and pulled it straight. “There, now your arm is straight,” he said. Then he bent the blind friend’s arm at the elbow. “Now it is crooked.”

“Ah,” said the blind friend. “Now I know what milk is.”

And Einstein, at the tea, sat down.

Here is a similar version of the milk story, retold by one Omar Kureishi, with Einstein now completely out of the picture:

A blind man asks a young girl to describe milk. The young girl is astonished that someone can be so foolish that he doesn’t know what milk is. “Milk is white,” she tells him. The old man tells her that he is blind and doesn’t know what white means. The young girl tells him that this is very easy to explain and tells him that a swan is white. The old man tells her that a swan may be white, but he has never seen a swan. “It has a curved neck,” she tells him. The blind man says that he has no idea what ‘curved’ is. She lifts her arm, bends her wrists forward like a swan’s neck. “Feel it,” she says, “that’s curved.” The old man feels the girl’s arm, touches the girl’s wrist and exclaims joyfully: “Thank God. Now at last I know what milk is.”

What of this strange connection between the “white” things called “milk” and “swans”? Turns out that goes back to Hinduism and Sanskrit, according to the swan page on Wikipedia:

Swans are revered in Hinduism, and are compared to saintly persons whose chief characteristic is to be in the world without getting attached to it, just as a swan’s feather does not get wet although it is in water. The Sanskrit word for swan is hamsa or hansa, and it is the vehicle of many deities like the goddess Saraswati. It is mentioned several times in the Vedic literature, and persons who have attained great spiritual capabilities are sometimes called Paramahamsa (“Great Swan”) on account of their spiritual grace and ability to travel between various spiritual worlds. In the Vedas, swans are said to reside in the summer on Lake Manasarovar and migrate to Indian lakes for the winter. They’re believed to possess some powers such as the ability to eat pearls. They are also believed to be able to drink up the milk and leave the water from a saucer of milk adulterated with water. This is taken as a great quality, as shown by this Sanskrit verse:

Hamsah shwetah, bakah shwetah, kah bhedah hamsa bakayo?
Neeraksheera viveketu, Hamsah hamsah, bakah bakah!

(The swan is white, the duck is white, so how to differentiate between both of them?
With the milk-water test, the swan is proven swan, the duck is proven duck!)

I guess the ancients required empirical evidence to distinguish a swan from a duck, a task the many modern humans can perform with relative ease.

Of all the versions of this story that might be floating around the universe, I like the original one I clipped from an unknown newspaper 25 years ago, because to me the idea of describing the color white to a blind person is much more abstract and interesting than describing what milk is, since milk, after all, is a substance that can be discerned by other senses. But how can you possibly describe “white” without referencing other things? Such is relativity.

The LT website features an index of all the articles and book reviews published in the journal’s ten-year history. Here is a mashup list of titles from this page — beginning with good old Simon Kirby, who leads off this list with a jaw-dropping title from 1997:

• Competing motivations and emergence: Explaining implicational hierarchies
• Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information
• The Implications Register
• A grammar of Supyire
• Ergativity
• Tone systems in New Guinea
• On nominal and verbal person marking
• An apparent typological anomaly
• The co-variation of phonology with morphology and syntax: A hopeful history
• The Ergative in Proto-Australian
• Language sampling
• Regularity in irregularity
• A parsing view on inconsistent word order
• The morphosyntax of demonstratives in synchrony and diachrony
• Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other?
• Intransitive Predication
• The colours of Tsakhur
• Split morphology: How agglutination and flexion mix
• The Decay of Ergativity in Kurmanci
• Tense Systems in European Languages
• Verbal Periphrases in Romance: Aspect, Actionality, and Grammaticalization
• The Navajo Verb
• A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals
• Counting genera
• Stochastic models in typology: obstacle or prerequisite?
• The indefinite-interrogative puzzle
• La négation
• Lexico-semantic universals
• Activation levels in Lavukaleve demonstratives: oia versus foia
• The complexities of arguing about complexity
• The case of Sinitic
• Historical baggage and directionality
• Complexification, erosion, and baroqueness
• Rejoinder to the replies
• Motivation for copula in equational clauses
• Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state?
• The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood
• Evidentials
• Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope
• The parameter of actionality
• Against implicational universals
• A case for implicational universals
• Significant and non-significant implicational universals
• Crosslinguistic insights on the labial flap
• The Structure of Tone
• Animacy and Reference
• Mental state postpositions in Tiriyó
• Hand, head, and face: Negative constructions
• Depictive secondary predicates
• The Origin of Agent Markers
• Testing Trudgill’s hypotheses
• On the complexity of simplification
• A typological overview of Mwotlap
• Anaphors
• Suppletion in personal pronouns
• Theory versus practice
• The place of reproducibility
• The Universals Register
• Motion, Direction and Location
• Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects
• Listening to the Pacific
• The semantics and pragmatics of composite mood marking
• Recipient-prominence vs. beneficiary-prominence
• A Pan-Dialectal Grammar
• The myth of a language
• Does sampling matter?
• The robust bell curve
• Multifunctional agreement
• The possibility of genderless nouns
• A typology of intensifiers
• Constituent order
• THE UNIVERSALS ARCHIVE
• Wider and deeper
• Explaining recurrent sound patterns
• Methodology and the empirical base
• Where’s phonology in typology?

This is like three Thanksgiving feasts worth of lingoism, causing me to experience multiple wordgasm. Time to get back into the studio. My apologies in advance to all of these undoubtedly brilliant linguists whose work I am mangling and will no doubt be plagiarizing in the months to come.

This it what turned me on the most (italics mine):

One of Ms. Kenneally’s most intriguing scientists, Simon Kirby, a linguist at the University of Edinburgh who works with computer models, has proposed the idea that language might be a self-evolving phenomenon. Somewhat like a computer virus, it changes and adapts to survive.

…Mr. Kirby, the computer modeler, devised an experiment in which subjects were shown objects on a screen along with words describing the objects in what was represented as an invented alien language. The subjects were asked to learn the language. In testing one student after the other, however, Mr. Kirby added new objects to the ones already shown, whereupon the subjects unthinkingly generated new words and combinations. These changes were added to the core list and passed along to successive subjects who, trying to master the language created, in part, by each of their predecessors, made their own additions and changes.

“Except for the initial random language given to the first subject, there was no alien language, only the contributions of each individual, which were culturally transmitted from generation to generation,” Ms. Kenneally writes. “Each subject in the experiment believed that he was simply giving back what he had learned, but instead the language was evolving.”

In similar fashion, researchers have been looking at Internet sites that generate their own protolanguages and linguistic structures.

I’ll have to alert these researchers to my site — they’ll have a field-day here. Actually, there’s probably too much English and not enough Alienish to properly nourish them. But we’ll see.

Perhaps they’ve already played around with another site I developed, Wordlab, nearly a decade ago.