This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

A good place to keep a word warm

July 22, 2026

What a SEN­TENCE from the gnomic Fringe Report:

A ner­vous system is a good place to keep a word warm.

!!!

The short post continues:

Maybe not the only one. Maybe no longer the best one. Frankly, it’s a super resource-intensive way to incu­bate words.

It sounds weird. It is weird.

It only gets better/weirder from there, accel­er­ating into a con­clu­sion pos­i­tively qntm-ish. I have no idea who wrote this post—every link I follow seems to sub­tract from my total amount of infor­ma­tion. Which I love. I would bet $100 that an AI did not write it; of course, as soon as I type that, I start to feel ner­vous … but no:

If words have found a less resource-intensive way to spread, what hap­pens to com­mu­ni­ca­tion for us? Some words are as vital to us as our gut biome. Claude would call them the load-bearing ones. I might call them the ones you’d rot without.

This is a human on the internet — publishing, I should add, on a really good old-fashioned web page.

Another good place to keep a word warm.

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