josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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When I was a child, I was asked who my hero was. I didn't have a hero but felt somewhat embarrassed not to have one when it appeared to be expected of me.
Eventually I decided that I would say that Steve Wozniak was my hero.
He wasn't, but he seemed like a good hero to have, if you had to have one.
'… the man who is to give you the poison has been telling me for some time… that I should warn you to talk as little as possible. People get heated when they talk, he says, and one should not be heated when taking the poison, as those who do must sometimes drink it two or three times.'
'Take no notice of him; only let him be prepared to administer it twice or, if necessary, three times.'
Words that transit staff use for describing pauses buses take on their routes:
'wait', 'hold', 'burn', 'dwell'
'…inimical to all attempts to sow the seeds of the new, to engage in daring experiments, to desire freely.'
'…so that it matters not only what some I or other says but that it is some particular I who desires in some specific place to say it. If my counting fails to matter, I am mad. It is being uncounted—being left out, as if my story were untellable—that makes what I say (seem) perverse, that makes me cold. The surmise that we have become unable to count one another, to count for one another, is philosophically a surmise that we have lost the capacity to think, that we are stupified. I call this condition living our skepticism.'