A Penguin is not a good (example of a) bird.
I thought it would be interesting to give a presentation about some of the ideas (Prototypes, Basic Categories) in Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things at MindCamp 2.0 in Seattle.
A penguin being a bad example of a bird is sort of a running theme in almost every presentation on prototype categories I’ve run into. It’s clearly a bird, but it doesn’t have all the attributes that most people would think of if you asked them to describe a bird.
Also amusingly, I was clearly in the low-rent porn and love district when I gave this presentation (which was on Sunday morning at 9am.)Â I’d like to thank the people who actually came out for it, it was a good time.