Ducking the Hear and Now

Sometimes flies duck, and vice versa. Having been rendered somewhat speechless by a recent morsel of Forgotten Wisdom on Abecedarian, I was forced to divide what remained of my voice between begging for a lozenge and asking myself what Craig meant by "megaphone."

I have no trouble understanding that the hear and now is to the present as the now and again is to the every once in a while, but it seems that both past and future pronouncements would be squashed in the megaphone's vanishing point.

If time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana, can the equations of linguistic relativity be far behind? Even if the flies duck, won't the not-a-river of quiescent time wet their whistles, leaving them to sputter and gag in the maelstrom of the hear and now? Zeno's stop-action film techniques may have been effective against arrows, but Einstein is said to have been aquiver whenever quantum physics entered the room, and he knew a thing or two about megaphones.

I think he knew that there's more to a megaphone than just multiplying by 10^6, and he probably knew other things, too.

 

2 comments:

  1. I'm picturing a bumper sticker that quotes you: "If time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana, can the equations of linguistic relativity be far behind?"

    I appreciate your a-river/aquiver rhyme and of course your allusion to a bundle of arrows.

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  2. Exploring the bumper sticker concept . . . doublewide bumpers aside, the sentence would have to be reconfigured as an equation . . . hmmm . . . hum . . .

    Exploring the allusion to arrows . . . this would require reconfiguration as an illusion . . . Zeno requires it . . . hum . . . hmmm . . .

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