Wednesday 30 May 2018

Inflation, lies and the "Twitter Rant" - and the people who notice

Word inflation seems built into language - words lose their force and urgency by the inbuilt tendency for exaggeration. Of course this has been accelerated to absurdity by the mass media.

Just as a small allotment shed cannot 'blaze' - the brief comments possible on Twitter can never amount to a 'rant' - and yet the term has been used at least 1.5 million times so far...

Therefore, anybody who describes anything on Twitter as a 'rant' is a liar; therefore anybody who describes a Twitter rant should not be believed - Because, that's the thing about liars: they should not be believed!

But of course the Establishment, the mass media, all large institutions, all individuals in leadership positions lie, every hour of every day; in every paragraph (they sometimes include a true sentence or two, to make their lies more effective) - we swim in a sea of lies: liars lying about liars.

We need a new word to describe 'us' - the kind of people who spend many hours per day reading, watching and discussing the lies that liars tell about each other...

Or maybe the word 'people' will itself suffice; given their massive majority.


4 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

I assume you're alluding to some particular story in the media of which I am blissfully ignorant. In all fairness I do think "Twitter rants" are possible in principle, though a single rant would have to comprise dozens of individual posts.

Bruce Charlton said...

@William - More like an interrupted sequence of discrete ejaculations...

a_probst said...

A gibe, sneer, taunt, jeer, brickbat, insult, barb; these will do for Twitter.


(I know from experience that some of the comments you wisely reject for posting are little more than rants. Thank you!)

Avro G said...

Your post about the full-spectrum lying we are subjected to reminds me of a related thing, the amplification of nonsense into matters of public comment. I heard an example recently on US National Public Radio. A glib, effeminate male (the only kind they hire) was babbling about a certain singer who did a version of the song "Me and Mrs. Jones." He went on about how only a black man should sing that song and how no one could be whiter than this singer, etc. A female hired giggler tittered in the background.

As I switched it off I thought, "A bullshitter bullshitting about bullshit."