Where Are My Ten Inches?

admin · July 12, 2018

English has a lot of ambiguities built in.

It makes sense, considering the history of humans and language.

Human language first showed up 50,000 years ago or so.

Nobody really knows, since there wasn't a record until people started writing stuff down.

And most people didn't start writing stuff down until they had a need to.

And this was most likely for accounting reasons.

Rich people wanted to keep track of how much stuff they had, and how much people owed them.

But before that, we can imagine what kind of stuff people talked about.

Hunting strategies, tools, and all the stories they made up at night while looking up at the stars.

The stuff they described at the time when language was invented was pretty simple.

Not a lot of intangible nouns.

Now, however, there are TONS of intangible nouns.

Tons of metaphors that are used to described extremely complicated things.

Metaphors about collections of metaphors.

Even something as "scientific" as mathematics may just be a metaphor.

It's sort of an idealized description of the physical world.

But some if the ideas in mathematics aren't really that tangible.

Things like different types of infinities, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers.

(Once I had a professor in college who said ALL numbers are imaginary.)

We can look at this confusing collection of words that we use to describe our world in a few ways.

One is to be in awe of the world, and walk around with child-like wonder.

That's kind of cool, but it's also kind of hard to keep up.

Another way is to have tons of fun.

There are plenty of ways you can say things that make our brains feel funny.

This is pretty much the reason we make and enjoy jokes.

One source of never-ending amusement is when the news media says funny things on accident.

For example, once a weatherman promised ten inches of snow one evening.

That night, it didn't snow.

The female anchor, before turning the news over to the weatherman, wanted to remind everybody that he said it was going to snow, but it didn't.

Unfortunately (for her at least) she turned to him and said:

"Where're those ten inches you promised me last night?"

As soon as she said, she realized her mistake.

The rest of the news crew (everybody, including everybody on TV) couldn't stop laughing for a couple minutes.

Human language has HUGE opportunities for laughter.

For fun.

And for much deeper trancey effects.

Which makes learning how to do this the PERFECT party skill.

Learn How:

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