This should perk up your evening: me being grouchy! Because nothing exciting happened in my life the past couple of days—save seeing Juno, which was a good movie—I have for you a couple things that get under my skin:
- “of” mistakenly used for “have” – While I normally salute the contraction, not in small part due to my [over]use of them in speaking, I hate it when people expand contractions incorrectly. In particular, I hate seeing “would of come”, “could of done”, and their ilk. I know mistakes like these have got to be because of how “would’ve” and “could’ve” sound like “would of” and “could of”, but if you just take a second to think about what you wrote, you’ll see that “of” makes no sense in place of “have”. I’m just waiting for C++ programmers to start typing out “would int” and “could int” for “wouldn’t” and “couldn’t”. :P
- “deep” questions such as “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” – I remember hearing this question when I was a child and even then it didn’t make me think for longer than two seconds before I came up with, “What if you left a tape recorder in the woods and walked away?” (There’s a sign of my age—tape recorders!) Now that I have a small understanding of sound waves, the idea that a large hunk of matter crashing into another large hunk of matter would cease to generate sound waves because of the lack of a human presence is laughable and pretentious. What, people are so important that, in their absence, the laws of physics cease to function?
5 Comments
If a man says something and his wife isn’t there to hear it, is he still wrong?
the 2nd one is especially annoying.
Honestly. Can we talk about something that’s ACTUALLY deep, really??
HAHA “would/could int” I really need to make a note of that somewhere.
Number 2, sounds a lot like the “anthropic principle” (see wikipedia for that, too lazy to link it). It seems a really interesting theory, but I also quite agree with you.
There are a lot of things we most probably aren’t able to perceive yet, nevertheless that doesn’t stop them from occurring.
Your comment on #2 kind of reminds me of one of my college general philosophy courses. I don’t remember who we were studying, but the theory was that nothing exists until someone – a human – sees it. Thus, chairs and desks and tables disappear when a classroom is empty.
One student in the class somehow took the general idea of theory to prove that our examination didn’t actually exist, thus we didn’t need to take it (I don’t remember the exact wording and would embarass myself if I tried to repeat it since I’ve forgotten everything I learned in college). Fortunately for him, it was so impressive that the professor gave him an A on the test and made the rest of the class take it without him.
Michelle: Wow. I don’t know whether to be annoyed at how ridiculous that logic sounds to me, or impressed at the awesomeness of that kid for getting out of the exam.