Tuesday 2/22/22
Ran 3000 stairs.
Worked more on "The Parable of the Woodpecker." It's 6100 words. That's a long story.
Twitter: Where people who don't know how "then" and "than" work and who often don't know that both words exist, think they possess the sharpest minds in human history.
Heard someone say this today: "It's literally ridiculous."
Really?
How many times in a row do you think you'd make it before you see someone correctly use the word "literally"? I'm going to say 25,000 times. I think I'm being conservative.
Not a small point, actually. We are so stupid now, so incapable of using language to express our thoughts, or put forward anything cogent, that we treat the word "literally" as if it's this button we press that makes us correct in whatever we'd like to be correct. We cling to it. Rely on it. Imbue it with super duper magical meaning powers. Treat it like a word upon which one wishes for the granting of correctness, so that others can bask in our correctness. Be awed by us. But we can't get a single, lucid, intelligent thought from our brains--where they also probably don't exist--out into the world, to be experienced and witnessed by others. So we just say "literally."
Do this with the next 8,000 things you read where you see the word "literally"--take the word out and read back what is there. What changed? Nothing changed. So why put it in? It's that need of which I wrote above. You are reading human need, desperation, and insecurity. That's what that word really translates as, the way almost everyone uses it, because they are incapable of intelligent expression. It's the word version of flapping your arms in the air and begging people to take you seriously, when no one should. And no one really does. But that's not the point. What is the point? As ever, the point is parallelism. And the maintenance of illusions.
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