Random Thought Thread

I love my host country sometimes:

 

So what happens now????

(Or is that a trailer?)

 

I think it's a trailer. Maybe.

 

I almost understood the first half of what they're saying. Then I got lost. Got to undust my japanese.

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197627/news

So apparently rumor is going around that National Treasure 3 is a thing.

OK, if it's real, let me level with you on something.

How the heck are they going to raise the stakes? The first one was them stealing the Declaration of Independence. The second one had them not only breaking into Buckingham Palace, but also kidnap the President of the United States (even if by accident.)

I mean, suspension of disbelief can only go so far and when your main character basically commits two really huge, egregious crimes in two different countries in the second movie and yet somehow manages to get away with it at the end...

I can't imagine how they're gonna do it this time.

 

Extracurricularly. I don't think it's a word.

I heard it spoken today. It didn't roll off the tongue well. (which is strange, because there's nothing particularly wrong with the word particularly, and that shares a lot of the same letters in the same order)

Last semester in a course about the nature of language, we briefly touched on how ease of pronunciation determines what becomes a word and what doesn't. It isn't to say that you're not allowed or that it's impossible for there to be a word that's incredibly hard to pronounce and sounds awful. Rather, those kinds of combinations don't catch on and enter common usage, because nobody wants to call something a "thgb".

But what I was wondering, is that if somebody has difficulty pronouncing a certain word like "extracurricularly", they tend to restart the whole sentence and phrase it differently.

"These time management strategies will help you extracurricularly- Er, time management will help you balance extracurricular activities with your academic responsibilities."

That got me thinking about what people with speech impediments might do. I wonder if they subconsciously avoid words or phrases that make their impediment obvious (which is pretty antithetical to the approach that speech therapy takes). My guess is that most speech impediments are so pervasive that one would end up just not talking at all if they went that route.

Anyway, it seems to me that a change in word-choice can become a change in phrasing, and thereby a slight change in thinking. That's what I was curious about. And it sent me down a rabbit hole of thinking about people who want to control what you can and can't say, thereby controlling how you think.

I decided to drive for 5 hours today so I had a lot of time to kill.

 

I used to think similarly about changing phrasing until I realized it's a game - a puzzle! Now it doesn't matter whether someone challenges me or I challenge myself to reword something. Turn them pieces around, make em fit. There's more in a big pile in that box over there.

 

Until they figure that out and take the box on their way out.

 

I read recently about an idea about consciousness. The majority of people believe that consciousness is limited to highly evolved creatures, but things like single cell organisms have no form of feelings; The idea that I actually agree with is that there's a collective consciousness on every level of being, from the simplest to the most complex.

 

"I need a dollar, dollar", said a dollar to a dollar, thus started another full packed dramedy.

 

Before I start this I need to stress I'm not mocking the uneducated. It's a genuine attempt to try and get my head around how and why a person comes by the idea that this is an acceptable way to write.

It was shown to me by my brother, following a conversation he'd had on facebook with an old school friend. The subject of the conversation is irrelevant (I think it was simple reminiscences over their time at school together) but each post made by this guy had a comma inserted after every single word. Yes, every single word. For example, "remember,mr,smith,our,old,maths,teacher,he,was,an,idiot"

Can anyone even hazard a guess at what is going on in the head of someone who writes like this??? Most people who struggle with literacy simply omit punctuation altogether because they're unsure as to how to use it correctly, but this baffles me beyond words.

 

Oh, never thought of that.

 

EDIT: Posted in the wrong thread. Will report in "Things that annoy you".

 

Apparently you can't drown in quicksand.

(although it does seem like it's still possible to get stuck in quicksand and die of some other cause, like starvation)

((I guess this technically belongs in the random fact thread?))

 

One horse will not be able to pull a four hundred dollar hand cart out of quicksand.

 

Four hundred you say? I would!

 

Sounds like a code phrase.

 

Which would be a problem if you lived in a one-horse town.

And had a four hundred dollar hand cart.

And were surrounded by quicksand.

 

"That was close! Damn near lost a four hunnerd dollar hand cart!"
- Slim Pickens, Blazing Saddles

 

Because some people still realize the value that a 400 dollar hand cart has!
... Slim gets it.

 

"Wire the Governor and tell him I said... OW!"

 

Don't get me wrong man. It's one of these days where I'm wondering how much the 75% of my liver would be priced in the black market. Just figuring out the logistics for fun.