Smitty’s Loose Change #16

Insanity is believing your hallucinations.
Religion is believing other people’s hallucinations.
Too often, its adherents can’t face reality, and force others to play make-believe.

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Quite often, Christian Apologists don’t believe some or all of the problematic passages in the Bible.  In fact, they pride themselves and measure their intelligence by how much of the nonsense and contradictions that they reject.  But they just can’t seem to take it to the logical conclusion.

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Semantic Satiation
You know that thing that happens when you read or hear the same word over and over and over and it starts to sound weird, not like itself, and like gibberish? There’s a word for it: “semantic satiation.”  It’s thought to be a brain form of reactive inhibition, which is a fancy phrase for your body getting tired of doing stuff over and over and over. Basically, when you hear a word, your brain grabs the meaning to the word and associates them for you. But when a word is repeated in a short period, your brain has to grab its neural dictionary over and over, and gets less excited about having to do so each time, eventually just saying, “Whatever,” which is when you just completely lose meaning.

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More Names – More Fun

I am fascinated by names, because many of them have origins and meanings that even the holders often don’t know.

I was recently followed by HariSeldon2021.  Hari Seldon is a character from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.  Sadly, this one doesn’t have a website, so that I can’t read his work, to find why he chose such an interesting and enigmatic name.

The German name Stemmler means stammerer. While
The German name Steffler began with a reference to a German king named Steffen, and means crown.

A vendor at the local Farmers’ Market is Gerber Meats.  A gerber originally was a skinner, or a leather tanner.  I find it amusingly ironic that the name that began with an interest in the outside of cows, is now interested in what’s on the inside of cows.

I recently learned of an Italian actor, named Violante Placido – which translates to violent, peaceful.  She’s a woman.  I only hope that her parents had a (twisted) sense of humor.

I have taken to carefully scanning the obituaries each day, to be sure my photo isn’t there.  Actually, I add up the ages of the deceased, and divide, to get the average age of death and compare it to mine.  Recently I saw an announcement of the death of a man with the surname, Posthumus.

Eurofoods, my local Polish deli sells two checkout papers.  One is Faptu Divers, which means ‘various facts’ or various pieces of information – more colloquially, gossip rag.  The other is Goniec, which can be a (courier) runner, an aide, or a (chess) Bishop – loosely translated nosy paparazzi.  The Tattler, and The National Enquirer, would be proud of their European cousins.

I walked past a car recently, and stopped to inspect its custom vanity plates.  They read OYEZX3.  Oyez!  Oyez!  Oyez!  It is apparently owned by a court clerk, or bailiff.  😯

Either one guy composes all the crosswords in the US, or there is a continent-wide conspiracy theory.  I do a crossword in the local paper, and 2 crosswords per day from the Toronto Sun.  One is from the NY Times, and the other is from the LA Times.  I recently achieved a trifecta of identical clues/solutions in all, on the same day.  “Game Of Thrones” actor Clarke = Emilia.  Greek god pictured with wings and a bow = Eros.  While the clues were not exactly the same, General whose reputation is battered, was General Tso.

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With so many things coming back in style, I can’t wait until morals, respect and intelligence become a trend again.