356 Glossary
”quickly” describing the way in which ”walking” is performed..Affirmative A word or part of phrase that states (”asserts”) something is
the case. Contrast to ”negative”..
Animate The quality of things that allow us to say they are alive, or exhibit
lifelike qualities. This means not just things like people or animals,
but also things that seem to move on their own, or even things which
posses a ”lively” quality, such as an animate conversation. Contrast
to ”inanimate”..
Article A particular kind of word that references particular objects. In En-
glish, these are the indeterminate articles ”a” and ”an” and the de-
terminate article ”the”..
Assertive Bold, confident, or even aggressively self-assured..
Auxiliary verb A verb that is used to give additional meaning to another
verb. For instance in the English phrase ”I can do this”, the verb ”can”
is an auxiliary verb, combining with ”do” to form a potential form,
rather than a plain predicative form. These may also be referred to
as ’helper verbs’..
Binary Anything in which only two choices can be made, such as binary
signals (high and low), binary numbers (zero or one) or any arbitrary
choice (one or the other). Notice that no choice is ever truly binary,
since there is always the choice to not pick either, and sometimes
even allowing both to be picked, thus making binary choices secretly
ternary choices, and sometimes even quaternary choices..
CardinalA cardinal number differs from a normal number in that it refers
to a number belonging to a particular set. Contrast this to ordinal
numbers, which indicate a number is part of some sequence. For
example, if we have a collection of 10 marbles marked 1 through 10,
then the marble with number 6 wriĴen on it has cardinal number 6.
However, if we look at in which order we can take the marbles out
of some container and the marble marked with the number 6 is the
first marble we pull out, then its ordinal number is 1 (because it’s the
first in the series of ”drawn marbles”), but its cardinal number is still
6 (because it’s still marble 6 in the collection of marbles)..
Clause A group of words that contain a subject and a predicate, but not
forming a full sentence..