In this instalment of the Daily Barns, I'd like to address one of
my pet peeves: people who talk without thinking. More specifically,
people who use canned expressions that they probably heard on
television or something, which gets constantly used often in
completely inappropriate contexts.
Those of you that have read my blog in the past now that I have a
pretty nerdy day job. As such, I'm disposed to fraternizing
with nerds with their own little quirks. Some of them are tolerable,
others not so much: this one is not so much.
One of my co-workers, let's refer to him as captain Long-Short,
has the afore mentioned habit of blindly using expressions. I had a
meeting the other day with captain Long-Short in which I lost count
of how many times I heard the expression: "the long and the
short of it is...". The more often it was used, the more it
infuriated me. I started thinking "what does that mean
exactly?" So in order to tune out during the meeting, I decided
to introspect on that subject somewhat. Here's what I came up with
(cracks knuckles and pulls out an abacus).
Let's take it as a given that
every question has two answers: a long and involved one and the quick
and dirty short one. So when one says, "the long and the short
of it is...", they are implying that both of these answers are
the same. In this case then, the question really only has a single
answer. This is a contradiction.
Let's assume that a question
Q, has a long answer LA(Q) and a short answer SA(Q).
Implicitly, LA(Q) is not the same as SA(Q), thus we
have:
~SA(Q) <-> LA(Q) (1)
If
I ask captain Long-Short to answer question Q, he will give me
the long and the short answer at once, let's express this as LSA(Q).
Therefore:
LSA(Q) -> LA(Q) ^ SA(Q) (2)
or
(LSA(Q) -> LA(Q)) ^ (LSA(Q) -> SA(Q))
(3)
If captain Long-Short answers the question
correctly, then LSA(Q) is true.
Therefore by (3) it can be concluded that
both LA(Q) and SA(Q)
are true. This contradicts the axiom (1) which says that they are
distinct; therefore LSA(Q) is a tautology.
“What have you learnt from this” you
may ask young mathematician? Well the long and the short of it
is that captain Long-Short likes the sound of his own voice and he's
a f*cking retard for making me think this much about a useless
expression (me thinks I should shorten his long). On the plus side,
it seems that not all of the math knowledge that I've acquired in
years of University have been lost to a gaping maw of beer. All this
to say that people need to talk less and do more (often do more
thinking). Less talk more rock as the expression goes.
Speaking of rock; check out what happens when you go on a bender
and let your friends cut your hair.
As
a sign that I can rock as well as I talk, my friends gave me one of
the most rocking' haircuts there is. I
always wanted a mohawk but my mom wouldn't let me get one.
There are a few morals to this story:
-
Sometimes it's wise to talk less and do more (or just talk
less in general).
-
Using the very expression one is lashing out against is
ironic.
-
Beware of letting your friends cut your hair while on a
bender. It's like a box of chocolates, you never know what your
going to get (see the previous moral).
-
Mohawks are awesome and you all should get one; it's worth
the trouble of explaining it to your boss.
On that note, I'll end transmission here. Until next time,
Keep shreddin' the GNAR!
J.
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