A professor of mine posited that most every sentence ever spoken or written had never before been communicated. There was some compelling math behind it, and some compelling reason it was mentioned, but I still find it dubious.
At the same time the infinite monkeys with typewriters are also writing novels about it
Your professor massively underestimates how much of what I say is movie references.
Ok buddy
“Hello, how are you?” has been repeated plenty. But after that things start to vary.
In the sequence of numbers 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9… Most numbers only appear once even though most numbers are a repeat.
- There are 9 possible numbers and most (88%) of them are not repeats
- “1” accounts for most (60%) of the entries in the sequence.
If we assume “hi, how are you?” is “1” and most sentences are another number, we can see how even with common phrases being repeated frequently, most sentences may tend to be original.
(I’ve not done the math and I’ve definitely not studied language enough to say how dubious or accurate the claim is, you just piqued my interest and I started trying to rationalize it all)
Obviously some template phrases are repeated a lot, but those are not the majority of sentences. Consider talking to someone on the phone for 20 minutes. You have the customary greetings that take maybe 30 seconds along with your farewell in the last 30 seconds, then you have the next 19 minutes of actual conversation where you exchange information. The conversation would not need to last for 20 minutes if you were just repeating the same phrases over and over again.
He probably assumed the sentence selection to be a statistically independent process, which it is not.
but “most” only needs to be 50% of sentences, and if you include puncutation, tone, context, speed, accent, cadence, pauses, pitch, volume, intent, method/medium, background noise…
For “written”, most of those don’t apply though.
can someone explain the image in context to the original post to me?
“Image in context to Text”: Cause both situations are unexpected and unpleasant.
But they are then ultimately unrelated to each other? The image could have been a poop emoji and the post would have conveyed the same message?
The long-distance relationship mostly conducted via text was going smooth but then it suddenly ended in a rough way as if wind from the video blew it over due to some TikTok direct messages.
Oh! Nice analogy, thanks!
Woah she was hydroplaning, not a damn scratch on her!
Does anyone else wonder wtf is going on in the video?





