Search This Blog

Friday, April 28, 2017

good and bad, potato and puhtahto

I had mistakenly thought that the eh came at the beginning of the sentence but now I see that it comes at the end.  I had an uncle who did that and being five years old I thought it was something peculiar to him.  My impression is that he came from northern Michigan and wiki confirms that Yoopers do it.  I also looked up aboot  and wiki told me that they don't actually say aboot, but say something between about  and aboot and our southern ears, expecting about and not getting it, hear aboot, much like the Chinese don't say l for r and r for l, but, having neither consonant in their language, they use a consonant, call it lr, in between the two and when we are expecting an l and hear lr, it souonds like r, and likewise for r.

Interesting those quirks in language.  We southerners don't have the eh which enriches Canadian, and yet we get along well enough.  And we don't have that male and female noun thing (which, I don't care, sounds absolutely stupid) or the plural second person (which seems rather essential) and yet we still get along.


Does the path from dog catcher to prez entail necessarily entail corruption, does it turn a good man bad?  I am thinking of that great movie, All the King's Men, adapted from that great book of the same name.  Did Willy Stark have the seeds of evil within him all along and that's what propelled him into the governor's chair, or is evil something that encrusts one in the climb to the top?  Is it the chicken or the egg?


I don't know where Old Dog heard that planet-wise life has never been better, but I beg to disagree. Certainly life has never been better for us first worlders with our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes, expanded life spans, comfortable homes, arts, leisure, etc.  But life is probably not better for most of the third world who once lived humble but  peaceful lives in their villages but now their lands are despoiled and many of them are at war using the terrible weapons of current technology.  And in the old days the fate of the earth wasn't hanging in the balance.


I couldn't get past the paywall of Beagles' link so I don't know what that article has to say, but as far as robots dreaming I would have to cock my eyebrow Spock style and say highly unlikely.  This talk of good guys implanting good chips and bad guys implanting bad chips is meaningless without some kind of definition of good and bad.  

Life is more complicated than the Lone Ranger.  Good guys and bad guys used to be terms that only kids used, now we see them used straight faced by adults all the time.  Maybe it has something to do with the way superhero movies are taken so seriously these days.  Good guys generally just means people that I like and bad guys means people I don't like.  But the people I call bad don't like me and the people that they like are the people I call bad.

Most everybody thinks they are good guys.  Why is there so much trouble in the world then?



If you want to eliminate that long expanse of blank space after your post go to the end and hold down the delete key until it eats it all up before you post.

No comments:

Post a Comment