Ermintruder
The greatest risk is to risk nothing at all...
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2013
- Messages
- 6,209
"There's nothing new under the sun"....including aphorisms like this one.
I was awoken this morning in the middle of the night by the sound of some revellers walking past the house in a noisy drunken gaggle of selfish indifference. My immediate instinctive thought, without any bidding other than visceral fury, was:
`Give them an inch, and they'll take a light-year'
I would swear that I've never heard this idiom before, from any source, and believe it was a self-generated novel quip made-up inside my head. Just a silly little nothingness, aphoristic but apposite. And in my half-sleeping state, I wondered if it might be a Unique Thought.
Of course, it's not. Not even a Google whack (remember them?), a search on Google shows as just 34 instances. This one will be the thirty-fifth. Mine is therefore rare, but not the first-ever use of the phrase.
So is it actually possible to have a unique thought? A truly-individual, unprecedented, non-convergent insight that nobody else has thought of, or (importantly) could think of?
Do all the communal experiences, exposures, drivers, fears, shared motivations, make us all neocogintively alike, just to be little molds of each-other? I'd consider that to be an unoriginal sin.
Or: is this just teleological tail-chasing?
I was awoken this morning in the middle of the night by the sound of some revellers walking past the house in a noisy drunken gaggle of selfish indifference. My immediate instinctive thought, without any bidding other than visceral fury, was:
`Give them an inch, and they'll take a light-year'
I would swear that I've never heard this idiom before, from any source, and believe it was a self-generated novel quip made-up inside my head. Just a silly little nothingness, aphoristic but apposite. And in my half-sleeping state, I wondered if it might be a Unique Thought.
Of course, it's not. Not even a Google whack (remember them?), a search on Google shows as just 34 instances. This one will be the thirty-fifth. Mine is therefore rare, but not the first-ever use of the phrase.
So is it actually possible to have a unique thought? A truly-individual, unprecedented, non-convergent insight that nobody else has thought of, or (importantly) could think of?
Do all the communal experiences, exposures, drivers, fears, shared motivations, make us all neocogintively alike, just to be little molds of each-other? I'd consider that to be an unoriginal sin.
Or: is this just teleological tail-chasing?
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