Dreaming of tigers

A fairly stressful day found me starting to doze off in front of the TV at 10 p.m., which prompted Nalan to tell me to go to bed. I protested that whenever I go to bed before midnight, I wake up in the small hours, but went to bed anyway. Naturally I woke up at 2 a.m. (self-fulfilling prophecies and all that). I was having a nightmare about the end of the world being triggered by an essay competition, which seemed really terrifying until a minute had elapsed, and pretty funny after that, even though the underlying sense of dread remained. This lends support to the idea (from Coleridge?) that we do not feel scared because we dream of a tiger; we dream of a tiger because we feel scared.

I also had a rather amusing dream involving looking at my mother's old photo album, which revealed that during the sixties she had organised love-ins in our garden and was friends with Timothy Leary.

I am still not sure how much the odd state of my brain is due to its attempts to rebalance neurotransmitters after giving up smoking. It's not a very strong hypothesis, since two months seems rather a long time to be still having withdrawal symptoms, especially since I had few if any of the normal physical withdrawal symptoms (constipation, shaking hands, cold sweats etc.). However, th alternative hypothesis - that I am by nature irritable and depressed but had masked it by using nicotine to up my dopamine levels - is even less encouraging. Fortunately, this is equally unlikely, since if this were the case, I should have been like that during the 1980s, which actually made up the happiest period of my life. Time to fish around for a new hypothesis.

William Godwin, in his mammoth tome An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, considered various theories about the causes of a person's nature. Showing fairly advanced thinking for 1793, he considered heredity, pre-natal events and early childhood experiences, and concluded that whatever influences these factors might have, they paled into insignificance beside the influence of a person's current circumstances. To return to our tiger analogy, in waking life rather than dreams, if a person who sees a tiger is scared, it is not because he has a timorous nature or had a bad experience with a tiger as a child; it is because he is looking at a tiger.

More bad etymology

Can we finally put to rest

No, wait. Whenever someone calls for something to be put to rest, it is a sure sign that the thing in question will haunt us like the troubled spirit implicit in the metaphor. Let me start again and simply say: "Here is another example of something that really pisses me off."

First, lets look into the true definition of the word "nice" so that there isn't any confusion of what people really mean when they call you nice:

The original meaning of the word "nice" meant being precise or exact to fit something else, it had no moral quality. In time colloquial forces in the late Victorian era made it common to misuse the word to abbrevaite appreciation for something that was pleasing because it was harmonious. For instance, a "nice" day was a day that was enjoyable because it was precisely fitting what could be considered harmony to human comfort in terms of moderate temperature, abundant sunlight illumination, and low humidity.

Eventually it was a term applied to people, but it never lost the implied original meaning of being an exact or harmonious fit. In the sexist society of that Victorian era, a "nice" woman was one with a personality subserviant enough that she made herself an exact fit to her husband. Victorian society was also caste oriented, a man might be referred to as "nice" by a another man of higher social station who found him similarly dependible, selfless, and in accordance with his dictates.

For the umpteenth time:

If a word used to mean X and now means Y, the "true definition" is not X, but Y.

Because diachronic change is a messy process, it might also be "Y with a hint of X" or "Y everywhere outside Cornwall and South Carolina", but overall, it's Y. To illustrate the point unnecessarily, here is an example of the same reasoning that the original article employs.

First, let's look into the true definition of the word "naughty" so that there isn't any confusion of what people really mean when they call you naughty:

The original meaning of the word "naughty" derives from "naught", and it was first used in the Middle Ages to mean "poor". Because medieval society was caste-oriented, it soon came to mean "morally depraved" or "nihilistic". In Shakespeare, a "naughty man" meant someone with no moral standards.

So when someone calls your dog "naughty", they really mean that it has no money, or no morality, or, well, something.

Privilege

I am not a "liberal" because I enjoy my privileges: I am not a "conservative" because I do not feel I deserve them.

The scare-quotes are to indicate transatlantic usage.