News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by kordlessagain on Saturday December 28, 2019 @12:50PM (#21900380)
"I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a poor thing but my own - which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself"
Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by cmuldur on Saturday December 28, 2019 @02:16PM (#21901014)
I couldn't comprehend the meaning of "pregnant words of poets". Can someone explain this to a non-native english speaker?
Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by bmcfeeley on Saturday December 28, 2019 @02:36PM (#21901170)
Poets pack a lot of meaning / emotion into their words — you could think of them as “full” of the stuff that makes up life, like a pregnant woman is more literally filled with another life.
Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by dredmorbius on Saturday December 28, 2019 @05:29PM (#21902252)
There are apparently two independent derivations of the word "pregnant" (though the roots may join), confusingly, both adjectives. Other than "with child", there is:

"convincing, weighty, pithy," late 14c., "cogent, convincing, compelling" (of evidence, an argument, etc.); sense of "full of meaning" is from c. 1400. According to OED from Old French preignant, present participle of preindre "press, squeeze, stamp, crush," from earlier priembre, from Latin premere "to press, hold fast, cover, crowd, compress" (from PIE root per- (4) "to strike").*

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pregnant

(TIL, for those who'd suspect otherwise. I'm quite a fan of etymology, and Etymology Online in particular.)

Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by harimau777 on Saturday December 28, 2019 @04:47PM (#21901994)
Probably the most common use of this meaning for "pregnant" in English is a "pregnant pause"; which are the points during speech where you pause for effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_timing#Pregnant_pause

(Although I've also heard it used for pauses outside of comedy)

Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by soulofmischief on Saturday December 28, 2019 @05:11PM (#21902153)
I think it has multiple intended meanings. They give life to others. They also carry ideas which implant themselves into others' minds.
[dead]
Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by cmuldur on Saturday December 28, 2019 @04:34PM (#21901900)
No man i just tried to search pregnant words of poets and found lots of poems about pregnancy which i liked some of them. I don't advise you to read though.
Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by idclip on Saturday December 28, 2019 @04:53PM (#21902028)
Your confusion is endearing it makes me smile with compassion. Bless you.

The word pregnant is used symbolically - a woman carries a child with great effort (the symbology gets even more significant if we consider the act of sex before the pregnancy) - and the child Is born with great pain, but eventually happiness of the parents.

So this symbol of promise-of-joy-at-end-of-suffering, when combined with the symbol of the word (as carrier of meaning) gives birth (see how im using birth here to explain something? Its a similar mechanism) to a new symbol, “pregnant words” - these words written during great emotional storms, and attempt to draw a picture of immense meaning and beauty to those who read it, if they are also in the right state of mind to understand.

Even trying to truly explain what it is, is kind of difficult.

We humans actually are “complex symbol creators” - rather than “language users” - its a wonder we understand each other at all sometimes, and its no wonder that we disagree so much.

Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by julian37 on Saturday December 28, 2019 @05:33PM (#21902273)
Ha! Ok... sorry. I wasn't entirely sure, "pregnant words of poets" are themselves pregnant words of a poet, after all.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to be condescending by pointing you at a dictionary -- I'm not a native speaker myself and thought you might find it useful the next time you come across something that doesn't immediately make sense.

Re:The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf] by dredmorbius on Saturday December 28, 2019 @05:30PM (#21902256)
For what it's worth, this native speaker only just a few minutes ago discovered that there are two independently derived roots of "pregnant". (See earlier comment.)