People Who Use "Extravagant" Language

Before I begin, I know this is lengthy but I encourage everyone to read it through, think about it, and then comment to me (on here or in person). This is a topic that hits close to home for me. Notice I put this at the beginning so people wouldn't get half way and decide they didn't want to read the rest and then not see how important this topic and their comments are to me :)

A quote: "Hegel wrote in his essay "Who Thinks Abstractly?" that it is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly but the person on the street, who uses concepts as fixed, unchangeable givens, without any context. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because he goes beyond the limits of everyday concepts to understand their broader context. This makes philosophical thought and language seem mysterious or obscure to the person on the street."

I take this to mean 2 things.

1. When people use various words without thinking about their meaning/context, they don't realize the ramifications of what they're saying, as well as what they're not saying. As a result, they have a set of static words which people take to mean something, but that that "something" is no longer necessarily the same referent (intended word). When we take language as something static, we do not realize how language works. This creates the possibility for unintended statements, miscommunication, and most often confusion on both parties.

2. And so if we are to then begin thinking (being aware and open), we must now step outside and away from typical verbage. Thus, someone who thinks about (analyzes) these concepts, and describes/explains things in "not-normal" ways, is seen as weird because they have to use words outside of the normal lexicon. But when the typical lexicon is steeped with ambiguous, if not vague, meanings and connotations, it is no longer fruitful to use such words when participating in discourse.

I tend to agree with this (go figure right?), but I do feel like I have some support for this (go figure again...).

I've begun reading some Heideggar and can't help but notice that whenever he begins to think about and discuss a particular topic, he often gives about 5 different and possible definitions for that word. Once the reader works through all the options and sees how he then begins to use the word, his writing becomes much more poignant and lucid. The reader realizes that when he uses a given word, this is in no way a nilly-willy invocation; rather, it is a deliberate, methodical representation of a specific concept (I emphasize the specificity), which all the more allows the reader to become more readily available to the thought of his work. And that is how thinking begins.

A perfect example is the beginning of this blog. I took twice as many words to interpret one simple paragraph. It says something about a person's writing when they can write very little and evoke a great deal of thought. (For me, its a sign of great writing.)

Those are my thoughts, but I am seriously interested to hear what my friends and family (or perhaps all ten of you who read this) have to say on this topic. This is something that directly relates to who I am and the people who have friendships and familial ties with me, and so I would like hear what other opinions are on the subject.

Sarcasm is a serious thing… no, really!

First, I apologize for never writing part 2 to my previous post (from August?!?!?!). That topic is now uninteresting to me.

Second, I realize this post is long. I thought about breaking it into two parts, but then figured, if its that big of deal, the reader can just read half of it, then come back two days later and read the other half. I’ll even denote a half-way point for those who desire to take this course of action.

Sarcasm is typically seen as the invocation of mockery or irony as a result of contempt for something. In either case, the intended meaning does not lie in the truth of the stated proposition. The intent of the statement is actually meant to be contrary to the utterance. So if you combine the mockery with possible confusion when hearing sarcasm, you are left with a dangerous rhetorical device.

There are two big dangers: 1) the speaker is taken as serious or 2) the speaker’s intent was correctly diagnosed by the listener as being sarcastic, but then loses authority or reliability in future dialogue.

Sarcasm, like most language, is based on assumption. The speaker assumes the listener knows s/he is being sarcastic and that s/he will not be taken to be serious. Now this assumption is usually not rash. We have intonation, and facial expressions which help assure that the sarcasm is relayed effectively. But with text, the assumption becomes much more precarious. However, outlandish remarks also safely do the job. If the listener (or reader in this case) understands that what is being said is ludicrous, then the irony or contempt is received more fully. Difficulty arises when sarcasm is not ridiculous. The more coherent and/or possible the statement, the less recognizable the intent, when sarcastic.

The second danger is that the speaker loses authority over time. As the listener begins to understand that, less and less, this particular speaker means what s/he is saying, but rather means something else, sincerity heads to the backburner. The more sarcasm is used, the more the speaker is taken in jest. It’s a “boy-who-cries-wolf” story where the boy slowly loses his ability to convince. As a result, when a typically sarcastic person wants to say what they mean, they will go unheard and their speech becomes frustrated.

Half-way! If you’re tired of reading what I have to say right now*, then just leave this page and come back in a day or two! * [and by “now”, I mean “now” as when you read the word “now”, not “now” as in when I typed the word “now”; although it is certainly possible that those days will be the same, if you read it today. And I mean “today” as in the day I typed “today”, not necessarily the day in which you read it.]

So why do we use sarcasm? Why do we *say* what we don’t mean? Why is it beneficial or even useful? Well I’ve already mentioned the primary reason, viz. to show contempt or to mock. At some point, repeating what the other said, maybe in a sneering tone, was signifying that if you take what was just said, and hold it up to the fire, it will wither away like the supposed waste you take it to be. In a sense, it’s a reductio. One is saying, “look, if you take what you said, this is the ridiculousness that results.” And so we use grandiose words to inflate their statement, and then pop it with our sharp tone.

Sarcasm is also funny. I haven’t thought much about this, but it seems to be one of the bigger oddities we have in language. Of course the bigger question is why is anything funny, but in particular, why do American’s find so much comedy in sarcasm?

One final use lies in the possibility for ambiguity. Again, this is a direct function of any rhetorical device or word. Unclear terms leave open possibility, and utility stems directly from possibilities. It is left up to the interlocutor to figure out exactly what is being meant by the word or phrase. The speaker has said it, and knows what they meant; but it now remains to be seen whether or not this meaning will ever be fully grasped by the listener. This can be quite useful and if correctly employed in this fashion, sarcasm is deadly.

Thus, I can say something sarcastically while knowing that most everyone else will think I am being serious, and plant a little seed (of sarcasm) which will wait to explode sometime in the near future. As people begin to understand more and more about who I am, what I’ve been saying, and my intentions, suddenly, the things I’ve said now take a different meaning: they become the meaning I intended, the meaning that now becomes a bit sharper, and this makes those words a bit more real.

Pattern

This post will deal with pattern. My next post will translate pattern into our daily life, with time and “fate” being considered.

Pattern first hit me in the face while reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. His entire thesis says that memory and prediction are the same thing and all revolve around pattern. Our brain collects input and remembers the pattern in which all the various data are sequenced. When we go through a situation similar to one we’ve experienced before, we remember it, and can better prepare for what is most likely coming next. Intelligence then, is our ability to recognize patterns in the world and then react appropriately.

The better you understand an event, the more likely you’re able to be in control throughout it. The intelligent being sees a piano falling from the sky and realizes it will continue to fall, and will crush them if they do not move. The unintelligent being doesn’t have a grasp on the pattern of events that are going to occur, they cannot predict the outcome, and thus don’t move, and are hit by the piano.

This is only a theory. But I find it extremely appealing and most certainly applicable. (You can see from this brief, unlikely example that there is a type of fitness level built into it; i.e. the intelligent being can understand events and thus keep itself alive). Hawkins believes that pattern recognition is an integral function of our brain. I would agree. Not only do we seek pattern per se, but also meaning (perhaps the two are closely related with meaning being the more abstract cousin of the cold, “factual” data that pattern connotates). As mentioned before, to understand something is to be in control. Also, to discover a pattern, is to provide meaning for a sequence of events. Having done that, we have taken control of the event, and no longer need to worry about the chaos an unpatterned, meaningless event would entail. Once we’ve given something meaning, it has value in our life, and fits into our idea of the world.

The next post will take a few of these ideas and raise a point or two, as well as a few questions.

P.S. My blog-friend Sam Nunnally has a blog series on an age-old topic of the compatabilty of religion and science. But he’s taken an extremely refreshing approach already (he’s only 2 posts in) and has definitely put an insightful spin to it. I think ya’ll will enjoy it.

The Sacred and the Profane

This post primarily consists of two direct block quotes from Mircea Eliade's book titled The Sacred and the Profane .  For anyone who's interested in religion, the history of religion or comparative religion as a subject-matter, I strongly recommend this book(oh, and disregard the non-gender-neutral language he employs. He wrote in a different time). 

The book is by no means an easy, nor straight-forward, read, but it will simply rock your world. There were points where I'd read a sentence or paragraph and simply stop and smile and/or shake my head in awe at the power and resonance Eliade's writing contains. So without further ado:

From page 23:

Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to "found the world" and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. Properly speaking, There is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.

From page 203:

We only observe that, in the last analysis, modern nonreligious man assumes a tragic existence and that his existential choice is not without its greatness. But this nonreligious descends from homo relgiosus and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the situations assumed by his ancestors. In short, he is the result of a process of desacralization. Just as nature is the product of a progressive sacralization of the cosmos as the work of God, profane man is the result of a desacrilization of human existence. But this means that nonreligious man has been formed by opposing his predecessor, by attempting to "empty" himself of all religion and all transhuman meaning. He recognizes himself in proportion as he "frees" and "purifies" himself from the "superstitions" of his ancestors. In other words, profane man cannot help preserving some vestiges of the behavior of religious man, though they are emptied of their religious  meaning. Do what he will, he is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacrilized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present to him, in one form or another, ready to be re-actualized in his deepest being.

.... Crazy-good.

Stupid Questions

First an update and then on to the true topic, the title of the blog.

I'm 2 days away from completing my summer course. Notice the singular noun "course" and not the plural which would have been the case had I not dropped my first ever university course. After the first test, and a few homeworks (one which was a zero because he had switched book editions while keeping his course supplement the same), my grade was hovering in the low C range. I figured I'd be able to pull that back up on the next test. When the next test proved to rock me worse than the first, I dropped it. I have no desire to have a C calculated into my GPA (not to mention that, given the trend, my grade would have been a letter lower than that).

Having said that, the class average, across the first two tests which I was there for, was a 62%. That was the main reason for me dropping it. When a teacher's class has a D- as a class average on his or her tests, something is amiss, and it doesn't lie with the students.

On a more joyful note, I've been spending some quality time with my girlfriend on the weekends, which has included: going to Indy to meet Shawn and Monica, going to her hometown fair to see her MC a "lil miss and mr." contest as well as model for a fashion show, and then this weekend, go to the Elkhart Co fair this weekend. Great times.

Speaking of fairs, since there is a 3-week dead spot between summer sessions and fall semester, I will be working at the Indiana State Fair for that period of time. That was nice to have worked out so I stay busy and make some money going into the school-year.

I will be going to Warped tour again this year. It has become a staple of my summers and something I wish would come around more often. Forty bucks for almost ten hours of 5 stages of music. I currently have 12 bands I plan on watching. So far, I've been able to see all the ones I've wanted to see in the past without them playing simultaneously. Hopefully that continues this year.

And oh ya, by the way... I turn 21 in less than 10 days.

Now on to the title of the blog:

There is a phrase I've heard quite often. Some might call it words of wisdom or something along those lines. I call it wrong. The phrase is "there is no such thing as a stupid question".

Let me explain some examples of where this certainly does not hold:

An instance where someone asks a question and either discovers the answer before the other person can generate a response or, along the same lines, was simply too lazy to "look" and "see" the answer right in front of them. I do this all the time, especially when I'm at work. I'll ask someone where a tool or something is and they pretty much point right in front of me to where the object was. I hate it and its a perfect example of when someone asks a stupid question. Its the same thing when someone asks a question and then discovers the answer on their own before anyone can respond. Did you really have to ask the question if it took less than 2 seconds to find the answer and you found it on your own? Probably not.

In both cases, stopping to think, for only a brief moment, will save time and the annoyance of the person I'm/your asking the question to. These types of questions are stupid because they're unnecessary. Not to mention that very little insight is actually gained by the actual asking of the question. Typically, the goal of a question is to find some sort of information in respect to that question which, before asking the question, the interrogator had no access to. When a stupid question is asked, this entire process becomes meaningless because, the goal (information) was already available to the questioner without the need for the question, making the question-asking needless and irrelevant.

One might say that we only discover stupid questions in retrospect, after we find that we discovered the information on our own, before any interlocutor could respond. But I would be willing to bet, that if we took a moment to think, and to consider just what it is we're asking before we ask our question, we would all save ourselves the time and annoyance of asking stupid questions.

Update and Cool Internet Pictures

Update:

- I am one week (20%) done with 2 summer courses at Ball State this summer.

- I am officially living in my first ever house (thus, I am paying all sorts of bills, including my first ever trip to buy groceries for myself).

- I picked a great week to stop working and  commence sitting in a classroom during the day (it seems to have been at 90 degrees or above since Friday, my last day of work. Last night it was still 90 at 7:30 P.M.!

- Now that I don't work, I can get back to running. Less stress on my body from landscaping and more endorphins released from the running has already made me feel much better and more energetic throughout the day.

- I have a girlfriend!!!!! Her name is Megan Burkett. Feel free to facebook stalk her, but she's more interesting in person.

- Her and I will be hanging out with my bro and sister-in-law next weekend in Indy. I'm very much looking forward to it!

- While in Indy, I'll also be going to a concert next Saturday with my friend Kolton. Notice: We'll throw down with anyone!... if there's only one of them... and s/he is smaller than us.

Pictures:

I have linked this site several times, but for those of you who don't know how to subscribe, here are some amazing pictures. My last post talked a lot about how small the earth is, and necessarily how small we are. But these pictures, with their blend of natural and human constructed geography, do give me a sense of awe when (on this scale, which is much larger than we're used to) we see how human beings capably interact with the natural world around them. It also helps show how there are some instances where we manipulate the world around us, and how we also must be adaptive and utilize what natural forces and events exist, outside of our control.

You are Here

Part of my summer reading has included Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. The book mainly is a justification/call for scientific research in/on space. Sagan is defending NASA funding (and other endeavors like it). I recommend the book if only for the pictures, which range from capturing the grandeur of galaxies, to portraits that merely encompass our little earth. Most of the book is explaining what all was gained and advanced by the Voyager expeditions, as well as the Apollo missions and others. One quick example is that the way we discovered that CFC's react with ozone molecules the way that they do, stemmed from scientists working on different chemical reactions which would be taking place in the atmosphere of Venus, which contains large amounts of cholrine and flourine. I'm not promoting NASA funding, mainly because I don't know enough about it, but the book does give you some good examples that can combat the ignorant, unthought ramblings of people who say space research is useless in light of the current issues here on earth. There certainly has been and can be much gained from such studies.

After that digression, I'll get to the quote this post was intended for, which has little if anything to do with the previous paragraph. It comes from chapter 1, titled "You are Here". I actually used a bit of this for a speech in one of my comm classes and feel that it is one of the most inspirational while at the same time, put-in-our-place couple of paragraphs I've ever read.

 Within the blue circle is the "pale blue dot" we call home. The picture was taken by a Voyager satellite as it left our solar system and turned around for a look back. Enjoy:

That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out there lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.