Originally Posted by
loje
if a word in a dictionary is spelled wrong... how would we know?
A Parody
On Critical Thinking and Quantum Mechanics
Well, I've thought about this, and I've come up with a post of epic (philosophical) proportions! I hope to beat Kant in his long setences with over 4 commas, which he uses for precision, however this goal is, in fact, not achieved, since one will simply be confused by the setence construction, and fail, inevetiablly due to the horrid grammar, to understand the setence's meaning, which Kant loves to specify to the letter, and according to him that's the only correct way to write, espically when used with latin phrases such as 'a priori', thus being very percise, from the begining.
Fucking hell!
To understand why a spelling of a word can be seen as wrong, we have to first understand how correct spelling orginates. Most of the words we have, come from either the greek, latin, or a germanic language, which takes lots of words from latin/greek as well. However, being the idiots we are, we change the spelling of words just so it 'looks' english.
For example, rhetoric comes from the greek word, when converted to the latin alphabet, which is, again, an overgenilization of the greek language, (god damnit why can't I have two commas, I'm going two freaking planes upwards!) , 'rheo', meaning 'to flow'. However us ignorant monkeys decide to be really dumb and a t between the e and o, however this begs the question, which one is really the correct spelling? Rheo or Rheto?
Truely the only arguments one can really bring are Argumentum Ad Populum (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum ), because spelling is artifical and nature has no way of defining a correct way to spell, nor are some populaur spellings correct. Hell, German experienced a huge language reform recently, and one must write "Straße" instead of "strasse" now, which makes absolutely no sense at all.
Seing as we can only use arguments of falcious nature to argue whether spelling is correct or not - spelling now resides in a quantum state which says that every spelling of a word is correct and not correct at the same time, since thats the only logical conclusion we can base off emperical evidence. That said, if a dictonary spelt "rhetorical" as "rhatircal" it would not be incorrect - but at the same time it will be correct.
At this point I'm grounding a new grammatical philosophy, the "Spelling Nihilism", which states that no spelling is inherintly correct - and thus all spellings are neither correct nor false, rather that, logically seen, they're both at the same time. I fear however, that this philosophy will quickly die out, as all books published in its name will have horrid spelling - and by extension, grammar.
On reflection - I hardly suprassed Kant in his grammar, indeed, I haven't even come close to his power of falciousally technically correct confusing grammar. I ask myself how he even achieved an overall confusing text without making mistakes.
(even if you have never been in sweden you must have heard about something)
