Non-Linguistics

The country was galvanized last year by the whole Jan Lokpal Movement, and a lot was said for and against the movement, its leaders and cheerleaders, and the thousands of Indians who poured into the streets in the largest display of public outrage in recent times. While we are all fashionably outraged at the way politicians misuse public money with impunity, a small look at the way we lead our daily lives is enough to show that what happens in the order of millions of rupees is just a bigger manifestation of a phenomenon that is integral to our everyday life.

[This post is second in the series of general posts on Linguistrix (the first one was Stupid Analogues are like Stupid Analogies). I choose to include such posts on the blog because I find the topic to be of significant intellectual/academic interest.] Harish showed me an interesting article. It talks about 10 food items from around the world which are considered delicacies in their respective areas, but which would be perceived as highly disgusting by people from almost everywhere else, even the most battle-hardened non-vegetarians.

I have always had a love-hate relation with analogies, though it has mostly veered towards hate. I agree that they can occasionally be illuminating and can make difficult concepts more palatable, but I have often considered them evil and felt that they do more harm than good. Usually, they over-simplify a concept to “dumb it down”, so to speak, but end up creating easy-to-kill straw-men, or make arguments go into a tangent just because people start arguing over the analogy instead of the original premise.