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I usually have Wifey choose the random letter of the week (to ensure non-author bias of letters), but she is all meetinged up at the moment and cannot assist in my letter choosing. So I did the next best thing. I threw something at my keyboard from the walkway by my cube and went with the first letter that I had not yet done. Sure it took 5 tries to blindly hit the keyboard and not get / or ` (oddly I got % as well... I haven’t figured that one out yet). Today’s randomly selected letter of my 8 th installment to my Increasingly More Randomer Alphabet of SRH is the 14 th letter of our English alphabet, the letter N. So without further ado…
N: Big N, Little n, What begins with those? Nine new neckties and a nightshirt and a nose
It was pretty easy to choose my own personal N-word… Whoa! Wait a second. That did not come out right at all. Let me try this one again, the first thing that came to mind when I thought of words near and dear to me that start with the letter N was absolutely Nothing.
That’s right, dear readers, I shall again wax eloquent about nothing (I am down to “dear reader” now, aren’t I? Oh well, the show goes on).
The concept of nothing is a difficult one to talk about because, well, how does one describe the idea of absence? Because of that intrinsic difficulty nothing truly isn’t anything without, well, anything. One cannot directly describe nothing, one has to skirt the edges of nothing. You can only make inferences about nothing. Its description is implicitly defined. It is everything, something, and anything’s antonym. That is just how it is when you are dealing with nothing.
Why is nothing important to me? Well, the irony of it all… The irony of the lack of it all? Oh, Hell, even I am confused now, and I am writing this drivel. Truly nothing is interesting to me because of the simplicity of the idea and just how earth-shattering a concept it truly is. The idea is simple because even a 3.75 year old can grasp the concept.
Little Man, How many rocks are in the box?
Papa, you silly! None!
But it is also difficult, because, as I mentioned above, it is basically not explicitly definable. Truly its definition is a conundrum because when you give it definition, you give it substance, and when you give it substance, it loses its nothingness
The earth-shatteringness of the concept comes from its application. If one removed the concept of nothing from our world system, it would collapse under the extra weight of itself, because there would always have to be something… anything.
My love of the concept of nothing harkens back to when I was in college studying some of the history of math. Yes, yes, I know… History is already dry, Math History was something beyond arid. It was desiccated. It was beyond dehydrated. I don not wish the fate of a history of math class on anyone, but I digress. The interest in the class did not occur during monotone lecture during the class, or the mandatory slumber inducing reading outside of class, but when the ideas from the class re-hydrated later by beer.
Ah, beer induced mathematics and philosophy… In some ways I miss it and in others I am glad they are over. I love the semantics associated with nothing. I love the mathematical semantics as well as the grammatical semantics. Nothing defies most typical conventions. The conundrums associated with nothing is where I reside.
To recap:
Franklin the plastic owl is Little Man's good friend now
Little Man's favorite thing to do with Franklin is launch him down the slide
Or kick him off the slide
I am not sure I would want to be Little Man's good friend
Wifey can sleep through anything except Little Man's feet on her throat
Or sleep next to him, now that I think of it
I have been playing phone tag with a doctor's office
All I want is some allergy medicine!
Have a great weekend everyone
N: Big N, Little n, What begins with those? Nine new neckties and a nightshirt and a nose
It was pretty easy to choose my own personal N-word… Whoa! Wait a second. That did not come out right at all. Let me try this one again, the first thing that came to mind when I thought of words near and dear to me that start with the letter N was absolutely Nothing.
That’s right, dear readers, I shall again wax eloquent about nothing (I am down to “dear reader” now, aren’t I? Oh well, the show goes on).
The concept of nothing is a difficult one to talk about because, well, how does one describe the idea of absence? Because of that intrinsic difficulty nothing truly isn’t anything without, well, anything. One cannot directly describe nothing, one has to skirt the edges of nothing. You can only make inferences about nothing. Its description is implicitly defined. It is everything, something, and anything’s antonym. That is just how it is when you are dealing with nothing.
Why is nothing important to me? Well, the irony of it all… The irony of the lack of it all? Oh, Hell, even I am confused now, and I am writing this drivel. Truly nothing is interesting to me because of the simplicity of the idea and just how earth-shattering a concept it truly is. The idea is simple because even a 3.75 year old can grasp the concept.
Little Man, How many rocks are in the box?
Papa, you silly! None!
But it is also difficult, because, as I mentioned above, it is basically not explicitly definable. Truly its definition is a conundrum because when you give it definition, you give it substance, and when you give it substance, it loses its nothingness
The earth-shatteringness of the concept comes from its application. If one removed the concept of nothing from our world system, it would collapse under the extra weight of itself, because there would always have to be something… anything.
My love of the concept of nothing harkens back to when I was in college studying some of the history of math. Yes, yes, I know… History is already dry, Math History was something beyond arid. It was desiccated. It was beyond dehydrated. I don not wish the fate of a history of math class on anyone, but I digress. The interest in the class did not occur during monotone lecture during the class, or the mandatory slumber inducing reading outside of class, but when the ideas from the class re-hydrated later by beer.
Ah, beer induced mathematics and philosophy… In some ways I miss it and in others I am glad they are over. I love the semantics associated with nothing. I love the mathematical semantics as well as the grammatical semantics. Nothing defies most typical conventions. The conundrums associated with nothing is where I reside.
To recap:
Franklin the plastic owl is Little Man's good friend now
Little Man's favorite thing to do with Franklin is launch him down the slide
Or kick him off the slide
I am not sure I would want to be Little Man's good friend
Wifey can sleep through anything except Little Man's feet on her throat
Or sleep next to him, now that I think of it
I have been playing phone tag with a doctor's office
All I want is some allergy medicine!
Have a great weekend everyone
Labels: History of SRH, Nothing, the 26
2 Comments:
History of math? Pshaw. Try the history of the study of history. Hmm, beer helped then too. I wonder if there's some... correlation?
allrileyedup:
Just how recursive could that go? Could one study the history of the history of history? It would be a niche expertise that NO ONE else would have....
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