Read-only concepts?
Caution: Incipient half-thought. Writing it down before it completely fades....

Thinking again about Semantic Secession. You can't recapture an organization or symbol after Satan snatches it. "Working within the system" doesn't work. After a church or a sacrament or a word has been possessed, your only choice is to secede. Get out, find or create a new church or concept or word. Don't let Satan squeeze you into a corner.

This is a new idea in the context of Satan, but it's old and routine in the context of inflation. When a monetary unit gets hopelessly inflated, the only choice is to create a new unit. When a grading system gets hopelessly inflated so that everyone is getting A's, the only cure is to create a new system with fresh symbols and fresh mappings. (ie you can't simply replace A with Aardvark, B with Bumblebee, etc.)

New incipient thought:

Some concepts and symbols and words are impervious to alteration. Their Read-Only flag is set to TRUE.

Obvious example in the world of cars. Model names like Biscayne and BelAir get inflated. BelAir starts as a special sport coupe and eventually slides down the scale and disappears as new sport coupes pop into the top of the stack. But model NUMBERS don't slide. Packard's 110-120-160-180 didn't slide. AMC's 220-330-etc in the 1960s didn't slide.

Codes don't get inflated or corrupted either. Nobody has ever snatched Morse.



Various groups have defined their own meanings and flavors for combinations of letters, but those secondary definitions didn't amount to total possession. Nobody has ever been sued for failing to say 73 at the end of a friendly conversation, and nobody has been jailed because his way of sending 73 sounded like

to some Satanic tyrant-fuckhead.

Is there a possible solution here? I dunno, but it seems worth mentioning in case somebody else can expand on it.

= = = = =

A few days later, a more refined and accurate set of thoughts.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, defensible spaces

  ¶ 3:00 AM