How About This For Some Light Relief
Posted: 02 May 2018, 13:32
I have always had an interest in the English language from the perspective of a bystander. I'm lucky in that I've never really needed to use it, on leaving education I was more or less a maths monoglot though I could also speak a bit of Fortran IV.
My particular interest centres on if anyone, anywhere, has the foggiest idea of what they are talking or writing about. For instance I invite you to take a simple word such as "work" and explore what it has come to mean for most people. I my case, in my first job, (1970) my O level Physics told me I was doing very,very little work, a few hundred calories a week, moving the cursor on my slide-rule back and forth yet that work meant I could live a life which a king, of just a century before, would have envied.
As an onlooker it took me several years to realise that "work" was nothing more than a social construct, something some people need in order to impose some sort of order on to, what for them, would otherwise have been a chaotic universe ( as in "my hard working constituents" or "my son is very hard working")....as a Mathematician/Engineer I've never thought there was anything chaotic about the universe, it runs on clockwork doesn't it?
So for the best part of 50 years now, when asked what work I did for a living, I've done my best to explain that I don't really do any work as it was all being done by very cheap fossil fuels. As the years have passed ( and deep coal mines have closed) I've added that it could be virtually no one else is doing any either.
As you might imagine this approach has led to a fair few interesting conversations; as a group, I have found, the only people who are up to speed on this are farmers for some reason ?!
Have you ever tried telling people that their lives are far richer than Queen Victoria's? Well if you thought explaining the power of the exponential function was difficult...
My particular interest centres on if anyone, anywhere, has the foggiest idea of what they are talking or writing about. For instance I invite you to take a simple word such as "work" and explore what it has come to mean for most people. I my case, in my first job, (1970) my O level Physics told me I was doing very,very little work, a few hundred calories a week, moving the cursor on my slide-rule back and forth yet that work meant I could live a life which a king, of just a century before, would have envied.
As an onlooker it took me several years to realise that "work" was nothing more than a social construct, something some people need in order to impose some sort of order on to, what for them, would otherwise have been a chaotic universe ( as in "my hard working constituents" or "my son is very hard working")....as a Mathematician/Engineer I've never thought there was anything chaotic about the universe, it runs on clockwork doesn't it?
So for the best part of 50 years now, when asked what work I did for a living, I've done my best to explain that I don't really do any work as it was all being done by very cheap fossil fuels. As the years have passed ( and deep coal mines have closed) I've added that it could be virtually no one else is doing any either.
As you might imagine this approach has led to a fair few interesting conversations; as a group, I have found, the only people who are up to speed on this are farmers for some reason ?!
Have you ever tried telling people that their lives are far richer than Queen Victoria's? Well if you thought explaining the power of the exponential function was difficult...
