Word: babeling
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Since computers can understand only two words, variously defined as yes and no, on and off, or zero and one, computer scientists have devised a babel of "languages" that translate human wishes into some variation of the computer's two words. BASIC is the language of most desktop personal computers, originally written for Dartmouth students in the mid-1960s; FORTRAN is an earlier attempt used mainly for scientific problems; Logo is designed for children; and Ada is used mainly for military problems...
Hostages in Iran; mendicants trampled near the Ganges; Hindus and Muslims arguing and imploring in a post-Sanskrit Babel of belief. This is the ominous Oriental setting of Don DeLillo's (End Zone, Ratner's Star) seventh and most accomplished novel. There, in prose as vivid and densely knotted as a prayer rug, his characters find freshly printed petrodollars competing with ancient formality. This, in DeLillo's phrase, is the world of "plastic sandals and public beheadings...
...humanities. But by the 1960s, when rebellious students seized an administration building, that whole system had broken down. "At the moment," a saddened Dean Rosovsky later wrote to his colleagues, "to be an educated man or woman doesn't mean anything ... The world has become a Tower of Babel...
...imagination in the U.S. and Western Europe seems otherwise occupied: television, bypassing the old catastrophe of Babel, pours the world directly into the mind and provides it with an intense, though passive, planetary public life. The consciousness teems with wars and disasters and space shots and pageants. It has become difficult for the solitary writer wringing his psyche over the Smith-Corona to compete with all that bounces down from the satellite. Besides, reality in the late 20th century is somehow more inventive than the literary imagination Its plots (Jonestown, for example) are weirdly fertile, fatally ingenious. The idly speculative...
...resonances that sound long after this remarkable book is closed. A few are comic, like James Thurber's If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox, a portrait of the crocked general handing over his sword to an astonished Lee. In two cases, stories provide a mirror effect. Isaac Babel's The Death of Dolgushov concerns the inability of men fully to apprehend the griefs and atrocities of battle; Doris Lessing's Homage for Isaac Babel is about the inability of children to comprehend the depths and subtleties of Babel's deceptively plain fictions. But most...