There's a word for that.

Maybe what I've got is a vocabulary problem.

I was just looking up "tautological" to see if it had any special meaning in mathematics, and thinking how learning words like that sometimes, with the "There's a name for that phenomenon" aspect, make meaning gel or crystalize or solidify or what-you-will. Meaning is only metaphors and assigned associations, after all. Oh, maybe it's more than that, and a logician or linguist or neuroscientist or psychologist could flesh out the subject for me nicely. But none of them are around at the moment, anyway. It's just me and the insufficiently strong coffee.

But learning the names for rhetorical devices, fer instance, can turn you on to when a rhetorical device is being used on your ass. You know?

I don't know what I'm talking about. It's not exactly what things mean that I can't get at; it's what I feel about them. Or is that the same thing? How can you think about anything at all, the way doing so at all thoroughly makes it one big swirling mess of nothing? Is it wiser not to think about anything much, or to think only a tiny bit, in a flip, cursory way, unless the problem at hand is something like how to build a suspension bridge or a better mousetrap or something so superbly grounded in the physical?

I am now ready to accept your awards for Most Vapid Entry On My Friends Page Today.

There's a word for that.

Maybe what I've got is a vocabulary problem.

I was just looking up "tautological" to see if it had any special meaning in mathematics, and thinking how learning words like that sometimes, with the "There's a name for that phenomenon" aspect, make meaning gel or crystalize or solidify or what-you-will. Meaning is only metaphors and assigned associations, after all. Oh, maybe it's more than that, and a logician or linguist or neuroscientist or psychologist could flesh out the subject for me nicely. But none of them are around at the moment, anyway. It's just me and the insufficiently strong coffee.

But learning the names for rhetorical devices, fer instance, can turn you on to when a rhetorical device is being used on your ass. You know?

I don't know what I'm talking about. It's not exactly what things mean that I can't get at; it's what I feel about them. Or is that the same thing? How can you think about anything at all, the way doing so at all thoroughly makes it one big swirling mess of nothing? Is it wiser not to think about anything much, or to think only a tiny bit, in a flip, cursory way, unless the problem at hand is something like how to build a suspension bridge or a better mousetrap or something so superbly grounded in the physical?

I am now ready to accept your awards for Most Vapid Entry On My Friends Page Today.