Round
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Clock
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Semantics
source: George Lakoff Times 7 Plus Or Minus 2
posted: May 26, 2005, 10:01 AM
by: Rebecca Sunnybrook
Finally all the syntactically legal things that COULD be said HAD been said.

We paused briefly outside the hotel to congratulate ourselves on this great success, but after a few cigarettes and some small talk about who's fucking whom and WHY, we were back inside, starting from scratch again, beginning the long road to saying all the SEMANTICALLY legal things that could be said.

The moderator, after a brief preamble which was completely devoid of meaning so as not to be inadvertently confused with the ultimate work product of our commission, finally began the session proper with the first semantically legal sentence:

"Actors are people," he said, "who have been born with the uncanny ability to be (or have studied and practiced and learned how to not CRINGE at being) utter fucking clichés."

The secretary recorded the utterance and gave it a reference number.

Suddenly my assistant grabbed her head and bolted from the room.

I excused myself to see what was wrong. The meeting ground to a halt and rather than waste semantically legal utterances that could not be recorded till I returned, they chatted in sentences devoid of semantic content or that did not obey the laws of meaning at all.

In the hall my assistant complained that our task was futile and could never be completed and that it made her head sick just to think about it. In short, she wanted out, and wanted the rest of us to quit too.

I explained that quitting wouldn't solve anything and that her best bet was to come back into the room and try to subvert the system from within.

She stopped sobbing and agreed to return only if I'd back her up 100% in proposing that the next semantically legal utterance to be added to the data base should be: "But please, for the sake of the planet, for the sake of the species, for the sake of civilization, for the sake of mankind, for the sake of the future, please, please, please, hurry the fuck up and get your self-righteous, sanctimonious, lame, hypocritical, fascist, murderous, child molesting, baby-murdering, ugly asses the fuck off this planet so the rest of us can breathe again."

When she finished I told her that I understood where she was coming from on this, but that I thought her ends could be more effectively and economically achieved by, instead, simply proposing the utterance, "small turds arranged in the shape of a heart." With emphasis on the heart and the turds.

She nodded assent and we placed our hands on each other's ass to verify the purity and exclusivity of our mutual trust against the tyranny of neuro-social biochemistry.

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