(June 2, 2013 at 9:02 am)little_monkey Wrote: It's been abused, overused to the point it can mean anything you want. There was a time, yep I'm that old, when the word was rarely used, and when it was used, people paid attention. Today, it's just background noise. Or it just means that the user lacks imagination in transmitting a better message.
I think there's an upside to that. It's one of those words that, when you think about it, shouldn't really make people cringe on its own. It's really just an exclamation with no real force by itself. Call someone "a stupid fuck" and they'll take more exception to the word "fuck" than to the word "stupid," even though the real insult is that you're calling them stupid. Doesn't make sense.
It's even worse when you get comedians who think that just saying the words is funny enough. "Politics? What the fuck is up with that??? (laughter)" <-- if you're telling that joke on a stage, I hope it's because it's amateur night and you had a few too many drinks.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
