January 4, 2005
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The Lightning and
the Lightning BugMark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the
almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the
lightning-bug.” That quotation occurred to me as, during the past
few days, I have thought about the differences between similar words,
phrases and ideas. I hope I get a chance tonight to write these
thoughts down, because ideas are perishable goods and I may not have
these particular ideas at a later time.My being able to complete these thoughts and post them tonight depends partly
on this computer. The noise from the CPU cooling fan and another
noise that seems to be associated with the hard drive have been
impelling us to shut down the machine occasionally, when the grinding
becomes alarming. It goes relatively noiselessly for hours at a
time, and other times grinds and whines on startup and on restart
several times, and then on the next startup it’s gone. Right now,
it’s a hum of variable pitch and intensity and I’m going to try to
ignore it unless it becomes too insistent to be ingnored.Other factors bearing on my completing and posting tonight’s blog have
to do with my breathing, the functioning of my hands and other body
parts, and the integrity of the roof over my head. In a world
that’s uncertain at the best of times, I’m having an extraordinarily
uncertain time right now.For the definitions with which I’m supporting my thoughts here, I’ve been using http://www.onelook.com.
Quick definitions (sentiment)
noun: tender, romantic, or nostalgic feeling or emotion
noun: a personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certaintyQuick definitions (sentimentality)
noun: extravagant or affected feeling or emotion
noun: falsely emotional in a maudlin wayLordPineapple, responded to my recent “nice” blog, and in particular to this paragraph:
Another word that has been giving me a tough time lately is,
“sentimentality.” A long time ago, Greyfox quoted me a quote
saying that, “sentimentality means loving something more than God
does.” I like that definition. It seems fitting to the
maudlin propensity I see among my supposed peers (the “ladies”) to go
all choked-up and sad over things that to me seem either natural and
inevitable (and thus cry out for acceptance and not for sadness) and
other things that are outrageous and unnatural and thus require active
resistance and change, rather than self-defeating sadness that changes
nothing and hurts only the one who indulges in it.
This is what he wrote in response to it:The Three-Headed Sarahs’ say “We do not DO ‘nice’!”I see nothing wrong in sentiment though, it is a vice of love and not of hate.
Aside from the fact that I was criticizing “sentimentality” and not,
“sentiment,” I was making no moral or moralistic judgement
concerning the “rightness” or “wrongness” of sentimentality. I
wrote of its futility, of how it helps nothing and hurts those who
indulge in it. Terry, on the other hand, by calling it a “vice,”
does appear to be placing a moral judgement on it, condemning it while
seeming to endorse it.Quick definitions (Vice) noun: a specific form of evildoing (Example: “Vice offends the moral standards of the community”)
noun: moral weaknessI cannot take issue with the statement that sentiment (nor even
sentimentality) is “not of hate.” Even so, I can, I feel, make a
strong case for sentimentality’s being not, “of love.” If it
expresses any form of love, it is a warped and ungodly form, born of
attachment and fear of loss when it is pure and genuine, and sprung
from cultural programming and conceptions of what is “proper” for a
“lady” to feel, when it is “falsely emotional in a maudlin way.”Above, I mentioned two more of the similar words with different meanings that I’ve had on my mind:
Quick definitions (Moral)
adjective: concerned with
principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior
and character based on those principles (Example: “Moral sense”)
adjective: arising from the sense of right and wrong (Example: “A moral obligation”)
adjective: relating to principles of right and wrong; i.e. to morals or ethics (Example: “Moral philosophy”)Quick definitions (moralistic)
adjective: narrowly and conventionally moral
A more detailed definition, from Cambridge Dictionaries Online, is:
moralistic
adjective (synonym: DISAPPROVING)
Someone
or something that is moralistic judges people by fixed and possibly
unfair standards of right and wrong and tries to force or teach them to
behave according to these standards:
Drug addicts need sympathetic, not moralistic, treatment.Is this ironic? I disapprove of disapproval. I
strongly approve of morality, of moral courage and moral behavior, and
just as strongly disapprove of moralism and moralistic behavior.
I guess that relates to my alignment, “chaotic good.”And since I’m on the subject of fine distinctions, there’s another
one: behavior versus the person doing the behaving.
I’m okay with judging behavior. I do that all the time, both my
own behavior and that of other people. I feel not the slightest
twinge or qualm of conscience when I do it. The way I can manage
to let myself off the hook for being judgmental, for exercising
judgment, is by not judging the people, but only what they do.
Smart people can do stupid things, ordinary people can do extraordinary
things, and worthwhile people do both worthwhile and totally pointless
things.I certainly would be disturbed, both in the forefront of my logical
mind and deep down in my conscience if I were to resort to judging even
the behaviors as “right” or “wrong”. I would consider myself to be totally off-base if I were to judge people that way, because that sort of behavior, to me, is simply wrong.
Even when I’m being discriminatory where actions are concerned, I
endeavor always to use words with better, more meaningful, useful and
precise meanings than the dualistic “right” and “wrong.”That’s because for me such extremist, absolutist dualistic judgments
have moralistic overtones as well as being unrealistic. We live
in a relativistic universe here, in the finite observable part of our
Superuniverse. Some thoughts, actions and things may be better or
worse than others in one context while being equal to or different from
those same other things in different contexts. Only the
intellectually lazy or morally blind and heavily moralistically
programmed individual, it seems to me, is capable of seeing things in
rigid black and white terms.Okay, I’ll have to get back to this again sometime, I think, if it
seems worth getting back to at the time. The grinding and
growling coming from my computer is growing fierce.Good night… erm… morning.
Comments (7)
Dear Kathy Lynn,
Either you have a true interest to insure your listeners/readers are receiving the exact intent of your words, or you are going a tad overboard in the “definitions” department. It is my experience that most people on the planet (and I’ll limit this to people who have a basic understanding of the English language, which is the only one I speak and write) do not split the hairs so closely with regards to word usage. In writing a textbook, one would want to insure each iota of meaning is clear, but for most people, and in most cases, the difference between words is not even noticed. Most folks can’t even spell, let alone decipher the gradations of meaning that might be inherent in any writer’s ouvre. I consider myself brimming with sentiment, but try not to get overtly sentimental. And if I fall down and then get back up, I tend to shake off the sediment. (Sorry, I had to sneak that in.) The vagaries of the word “nice” as you have pointed out are very interesting.
Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool
Mark twain is quite an insightful man. Have you read a lot of his work? I spent an entire semester analyzing his writing. It was a facinating semester!
Excellent post. Our words have definitions for a reason. To not use the right word when it is available sort of defeats the purpose of language. Taking things to an extreme, one could argue that since we use inflections and different tones of voice, we don’t even need all the words we have. Heck, let’s just use one word over and over, and either by yelling it or whispering it or singing it, others will know what we mean.
Just because (as baldmike2004 pointed out) “most folks can’t even spell,” I’m not going to “dumb down” my writing to accommodate their lack of vocabulary. If everyone did that, the English language would end up in a sorry state indeed.
Nice blog.
But seriously folks, oops–now this is bf, I dunno why. Sigh. Hit a mystery key again. Shit, now I forget what I was going to say.
Possible political blogfodder in adn today. Two legislators, rep and dem, recently introduced a bill to make lying in political ads illegal. ADN editorialized against it.
Oh, and I stupidly left a nother comment for you following my latest blog, realized what I did after I did it.
not sure what your hard drive sound is … if you start hearing clicking, watch out, as that’s a sign the hard drive’s going bad
I think Lenny Bruce had the right idea…say something over and over again and it cleanses any pitfalls the word may have. We are what we believe.
sometimes i read what you say and have nothing of any relevancy to say in response.
this
would be one of those times.
i do think, however, that anyone who has taken the time to read your writing and “know you” [as much as one can thru words], should know that you speak your mind. plain and simple as that. namby pamby is not sometime to which you aspire. might seem to sting at times but it’s better than pandering and nodding.
did that make sense or should i have left it with my not knowing what to say?