Oh, hey! It's been a while since we played my little word-association game, innit? Up for another round? (Pretend you are, no one need know the truth...)Using Random Word at watchout4snakes, I'm going to toss out a word and you're going to share the first thing that comes to your mind in the comments section below.
You will share, won't you? Pretty please?
Today's random word is...
knowledge
+ + +
This made me think of how folks repeat or pass along things they think they know to be true or correct but aren't. For example, some people think the word mischievous has four syllables and pronounce it miss-CHEE-vee-uhs, when it has exactly three syllables and should be pronounced MISS-chiv-uhs. But because so many hear it pronounced incorrectly, they continue to perpetrate this injustice against vocabulary.
Or how it's widely believed that medieval mfrs thought the Earth was flat and needed Chris Columbus to prove to them that it's, like, totally round and junk--nah, son, that was just some bullshit Washington Irving made up (of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow fame) (Sleepy Hollow, BTW, was known as North Tarrytown in Irving's day, and remained N. Tarrytown until its name was changed in 1996 so the town could take advantage of its spoopy reputation and bring in some lovely scream-tourism lucre).
I mean, I know I've done this kinda thing as well but I've been taking pains to be more careful (especially in this surreal century) and I have no problem admitting when I've got no frickin' clue about something. #BeingTheChangeIWantToSeeInTheWorld. The advent of the Internet and search engines seemed to promise a golden age in which ignorance would die a long-overdue death and the truth about practically any given subject could be easily discovered. And while it's true that information can be obtained faster than ever before, there's a whole lotta nonsense cast out onto the World Wide Web, and the dawn of so-called artificial intelligence in one's search results may or may not be correct (I'm lookin' at YOU, Google, with your AI summary at the top of the page, in which I have more than once caught multiple errors.)
In this virtual world where misinformation abounds and #EverythingIsCake, are we going to reach a point in which the things we think we know aren't worth knowing at all?
+ + +
If you dare...
Knowledge should be power, but maybe not in this era. Ignorance reigns, and knowledge is sneered at. Opinion is power now, and it's not even educated opinion. Sigh. Going down the rabbit hole. Knowledge does not equal opinion; it's based on fact, which opinion may be, but often is not.
ReplyDelete