Ahh, yes, the EHCU, Mark I.

Harry Jones,

That was a nice framework for understanding in its own right.

Those who choose to understand nothing will always talk about complexity. Those who think they understand everything will always talk about how it’s all so simple. Those who actually understand will say nothing, but simply draw sword and cut the knot. Proof by demonstration.

Those who admit to themselves that they don’t understand a thing will say and do nothing, but will watch intently in case someone else knows what to do.

When I was young and search of answers, I looked to others to tell me what I needed to know. When I realized their advice was worthless, I resolved to ask only for specific information, and to piece together my own answers from the data. Along the way I discovered that everything’s simple until you realize you don’t understand it, then it’s complicated until you figure out how it actually works, and afterwards it’s all just attending to details.

Yes, that’s the “Rectification of Names”, which is quite the most dense little bit of “ye olde anciente wisdome” I have ever encountered. It applies to so much–Buzzword bingo in managerial fads, self-knowledge, identification of bad ideas espoused by others…

I’m not a very smart man, but when I read that for about the fifteenth time, it finally clicked with me what it was trying to say. It was couched in terms of simplistic wisdom appropriate to a pre-Industrial Age totalitarian state, but you could hear the dulcet tones of the mind behind it, ringing like a bell in the distance of some icy fall morning.

There’s a lot of the world and how we deal with it encapsulated in that little Analect. More people should read it, and recognize the wisdom of calling a spade a spade, instead of trying to come up with new ways of mangling the language to call it something like an earth-moving hand-held cultivation utensil.

A year or so ago I actually saw, for the first time, someone attack Alexander the Great for hacking the Gordian Knot with his sword, until now a universal metaphor for cutting through bullshit, but for this author a failure to understand the “complexities” of Asia. I think that whatever else might be said of him, he wasn’t brought short by those complexities but rather used them to his advantage. Dude convinced the Egyptians he was a god, the Persians to make him the heir of Cyrus the Great, and so on. He knew how to use the complexities.

But I digress. All this progressive guff about complexity, and here these filmmakers keep stressing how surprised they are to find complexity, in the tone of entomologists studing an ant colony. They’re always surprised when they actually see it.

Was that the Rectification of Names? I used to have an excerpt on the office wall right next to a couple of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons making related points.

One of them was one in which Calvin decided to take up the practice of “verbing” everything, and concluded that “verbing weirds language”.

The other was one in which he preached to Hobbes the virtues of using words to obscure and ultimately eliminate meaning. His book report was called “The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study of Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes.”

Putting this stuff on the wall at work is probably a step short of a hate crime now.

A quick google [heh] brings it up: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGRV_enCA785CA785&sxsrf=ACYBGNQ5yobYNeCbJbh-IDmzJmJdq3jEow:1571840125129&q=calvin+hobbes+dick+jane&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiy47TiyLLlAhXITN8KHf3jBWMQsAR6BAgJEAE&biw=1327&bih=688&dpr=1.25

The other one https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGRV_enCA785CA785&biw=1327&bih=688&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNTrXSG35EHKJAg0Gt7mKOLu6-oE4g%3A1571840132459&sa=1&ei=hGCwXY7UG_LH_QaHt5G4Dw&q=calvin+hobbes+verbing&oq=calvin+hobbes+verbing&gs_l=img.3..0l2j0i8i30.97916.98862..99536…0.0..0.236.1290.0j5j2……0….1..gws-wiz-img.jq5SQ5cPzGc&ved=0ahUKEwiOpvTlyLLlAhXyY98KHYdbBPcQ4dUDCAc&uact=5

Sometimes, specialized language means that a field or profession possesses such innate esoterica that you can’t seriously work in it without that vocabulary. When that is the case, the terminology arises organically from the practitioners. It’s a bottom-up affair, usually quirky and humorous. Examples might be the way physicists named the various sub-atomic particles and their characteristics.

When a jargon is top-down imposed by “great thinkers” in a subject area, nine times out of ten, the terminology is sheerest BS, created out of thin air to discuss matters those supposed “experts” have also conjured out of thin air, and which they only vaguely misunderstand. The jargon is a sign and representation that they’re essentially clueless about much of what they’re talking about, because they’re actively trying to (either consciously or unconsciously) camouflage their ignorance and sloppy thinking as they speak their cant and gibberish.

Confucius and the 13th Analect come to mind. It’s amazing how that part of his work resonates today, and through the ages. It’s almost like it is ancient wisdom, or something…

A word like “impactful” makes me think of my wisdom teeth.

The therapy has been expensive, and it’s taken me quite some time to put all of my sensitivity to buzzfoolery behind me. You are setting my counseling back years, if not decades… Have you no decency?

;)

How ’bout a methodology that synergizes impactfulness? What wrong can you find in that?

Every single person I’ve ever heard use that word in a sentence without deliberate sarcasm aforethought has been a mindless drone with little or nothing to contribute to any conversation they were engaged in.

I don’t see much in that woman’s writing to change my opinion on that.

Also… “Journalism and film…”. Choice of study subjects self-identifies her as an abject and irredeemable moron. Film. And, journalism… The last resorts of the intellectual flyweight, and general moron. I have yet to see the slightest sign of anything approaching erudition or wisdom from anyone pursuing or attaining educational certification in either of those laughable “disciplines”.