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Tuesday, October 08, 2002
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Re: We are being manipulated!
The Raven is raising an interesting issue that begs some questions. I really like the way he shows how advertisers try to tag upon our subliminal urges, needs, insecurities, etc., so sell us a product. Logic alone does not work says the Raven, and the advertisers realize that. Well, that is absolutely right! If that were the case would you expect them to do anything else? What it means, if the Raven correctly, is that we are being manipulated by advertisers and subsequently by our politicians. I have to agree, this is not necessarily a pleasant picture. My question regarding this (as well as regarding any type of criticism) is "What are the alternatives?" Does a scenario exit where our politicians would use perfect syllogism to argue their points? If that were truly the case, Democracy would not be the perfect system of choosing the right course of political action. At any public forum, the various parties would submit their arguments neatly printed out in formal Symbolic Logic. The argument that is most consistent wins. C'est tout.
However much we would like to tout ourselves as rational beings, it is palinly demonstrated (Raven has plainly demonstrated in this post) that whole of a lot of subliminal urges direct our actions. It follows then that in order to influence our actions (make us buy a particular product) people (politicians and advertisers) have to resort to ways that can affect our actions, and logical argument does not quite do it. So what do we do? I don't know, but I have not found a better way than the one we currently have. If people (Raven and such as he) are allowed to see the truth for what it is and blog about it, it's not altogether a lost cause...
5:23:27 PM 
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Neologisms – my contribution
One always wonders how they happen. I was told the other day that Herbert Hoover coined “Normalcy”. It takes a certain amount of vanity, hubris and an altogether over inflated ego to want to coin a neologism and then start pushing it actively into the language. Since, to my knowledge, I don't suffer from deficiency in any of the aforementioned admirable qualities, I have several neologisms I'd like to introduce into the English language. Today I will start with what is arguably my favorite: VIAGRIC, pronounced vaiAgric. This is an adjective denoting something or someone possessing a superlative quality, so superlative indeed that it brings one to the brink of sexual ecstasy. The connotative meaning here is that hitherto, one could not reach the said state of rapture, but now, having encountered the thing that is Viagric has reached a new experiential high.
To all the readers of this blog I say -- go into the world and spread this good word. Sprinkle it generously upon the ears of both suspecting and unsuspecting listeners, so that soon it will be heard all over the land and become an active part of our vocabulary (and maybe will be featured in William Safire's "On Language" column in the Sunday Times). For extra credit, sneak into people’s computers, start MS Word, type a sentence with “Viagric” in it, do a spell check, and when the silly checker does not recognize the word you just typed, add it into the internal dictionary.
10:20:48 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Daniel Dolinov.
Last update: 11/1/2002; 3:34:06 PM.
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