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.

Tags:Mohawks, Expressions
Published by jr_barns: 10:32 PM
Views: 1641