"But now you can choose whether to be male, female, or something else—and when the American Psychiatric Association releases their new manual, it will be perfectly normal."
Oxford Shorter English Dictionary:
Nominalism. The view which regards universals or abstract concepts as mere names, without any corresponding realities.
If "gender" is anything we say it is, no wonder the people in the Modernity Matrix are all so miserable. Imagine living in Upsidedownland, a universe where the real is only what we decide it is from moment to moment, where the walls don't have to hold up the ceiling, where up can mean down, where there is no difference between here and there and two opposing things can both be true.
But don't try to imagine it for too long or you might hurt yourself.
~
3 comments:
So, we have an interesting series of popular disconnections, ignoring or denying: that letters are for spelling words, that words are for ideas, and that ideas are for real things.
Do we hope, dear Hilary, that we might set something of a good example for the unhappy misologists? (Not that I'm any great shakes at orthography) A sudden inrush of visitors might well be providential for them!
Pshaw.
Why cast our pearls out to the general unwashed?
I'm not saying, of course, that anything should be addressed to them, or written with their reading it too much in mind --- that's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the monosyllabary picture books you recently lamented, though at your keyboard doubtless something much stranger would result; I just mean that, well, thank Who Is that someone somewhere is still building something of a verbal jungle-gym on which one might sprain an ankle, but will certainly get a work-out.
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