[ExI] comprisition, was: New Bioscience Company Raises $15 Million to Revive Woolly Mammoth

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Fri Sep 17 13:47:31 UTC 2021


 

 

…> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] comprisition, was: New Bioscience Company Raises $15 Million to Revive Woolly Mammoth

 

I once kept a list of words that had 'up' added to it.  Pages and pages before I finally quit. Many of them made no sense at all.  The house burned down - the people burned up…

 

That can happen, if the fire is hot enough and burns long enough.  Some houses contain a lot of steel which stays down while the rest of it (including the occupants (who are mostly composed of carbon (thanks for the education on composed vs comprised))) can burn up, in the form of hot carbon dioxide.

 

>…The winner in the odd category:  'up under the house'.  Why not 'down'?  Odd.   bill w

 

It’s a southern thing BillW.  Heard it since I was a child.  Something can be “up and underneath” rather than down underneath, which I too thought was an odd saying, but it was around a long time before we came along.  

 

The word up is overworked, as any short word will be of course, but this encourages the creative imagination.  Up can mean awake, so that ‘up under the house’ can mean you are fully awake (or perhaps aroused) down there, which is advisable considering the risk that crawling around up under the house can result in having a rattlesnake bite your goddam nose off.  

 

If on the other hand, we say down underneath the house, it makes it sound like one is temporarily non-functional or is copulating below the main floor, perhaps both of these simultaneously, but again, most unadvisable.

 

Words are tools, but they are also toys.  English is great for cutting up on ExI-chat.  There it can be exercised in all its refulgent glory for a mostly indulgent crowd.  A most marvelous aspect of the remarkable ambiguity and versatility of English is its ability to stimulate the imagination, particularly in those whose imaginations are already hyperactive, the minds which are cheerfully and intentionally overstimulated.  

 

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20210917/53701d36/attachment.htm>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list