Slash-and-burn is a category killer, just watch me blur a cleaving to/apart
more Cormac Orthography, a detailed little devil
A major revision made June 2024 of this post can be seen at Slash-and-blur worldculture part 1 and at part 2
First some homework, in prep for my use of slashes (both fore and aft), in the discussion below:
I am coming to this in 2023 or so, decades after the development of the backslash by Microsoft in order to make MS-DOS backwards compatible with some IBM choices.
The very early usages and development of the many-named mark took place in the Fraktur script used throughout Central Europe in the early modern period. This gave us punctuation like the comma, and the equals sign =. As such, and elsewhere in other uses, later times, it was used to notice the… —gap between, or to elide the-gap between, in lists, hierarchies of time like 2023/07/05 (which informs file and directory hierarchy use), as well as to separate but connect, or actually divide and so denominate fractions like this ½, also creating %.
Writing, usage, formal logic, mathematics, computing, coding, counting, scoring runes on wood by other means.
However, today, it is the contronymic facility in cleaving to and cleaving apart, in the use of a score that both marks and spaces, that I want to use in listing items in order to “re-unite” them.
I re-unite them in order to re-frame questions that are perhaps too silly for words otherwise. Where a usage separates a thing X from other things, it does not mean it (X) arose when it was separated.
It is as if blurring things helps us see more clearly — perhaps by adding chaos to a noisy signal, lifting the imperceptible ‘signal’ into notice.
We already have a folk blur with the use of the slash in conversation.
As my inspiration, I will take a common usage of the “/” and elaborate it into a practice1.
The slash is common enough to be verbalised by people in conversation, much like people “air quote” words with their fingers in order to italicise them, and thus raise into a meta notice. In short people will list/enumerate/chunk/ words to avoid getting too deep into discussion as to which is most appropriate. Then, once the list is slash-itemised, this list of things/concepts/ideas/causes has been ‘tabled’ (—in both the American and British senses of that recently diverging contronym). It’s a “whatever” function of general indications. A bracketing command to ‘hold that thought’ while we…
—e.g. ‘Work slash life balance.’
This use of a spoken punctuation mark to list related terms, or merely terms of concern in a certain context, puts them on one line using the mark “/” (slash) to indicate they are separate line items in one list, or have some relationship yet to be identified, labelled or quantified. As such it acts as a conjunction like and, or, on occasion, and/or.2
“Work/life balance like, you know…”
But I’ll put them on one line, / you know what I mean. / I’ll just put them here as a job lot, / or list of tasks/ while we get on with Y. Hold that thought…
“Work/life balance like, you know…”
In this example the slash as a figure speech is used to indicate a sphere of life (work/life) in which the elements however must be (re-)integrated, using the basic bilateral animal embodied metaphor of balance (please imagine here the personified blindfolded statue of Justice on top of the Old Bailey in London).
The slash lists chunks, and in chunking, it blurs the elements/factors together, for the moment, and perhaps, will be unpacked later/drilled down into/like in a deep dive. The members of the list may or may not otherwise have anything in common, outside of being in the world. The chunking doe snot imply a super-set will be found.
The usage itself can thus become a useful cognitive blur. (We have jargon in our lives we cannot always recognize their gamey-ness.)
As already said, the words so slashed in a blur may be related or not. The purpose of the blur is not to reintegrate what the world differentiates, more to basket them in a use that is part-list/part/union/part\parenthesis. The blur is a crude “mash up” that things thing anew. 3 . It’s a way to engage in thinging, by chunking bits (back) together.
The slash does not cut but “somehow” joins, or at least indicates the recently subdivided, like breaking pieces of bread to share out on a platter. The slash is the meal, it is the meeting at the meal we share. The slash is the movement, not the outcome. The activity, the verb, not the result.
The how is to be “determined”. Decided. It is a meeting after all. What do you bring to the table?
See other contronyms like “fast” as examples of a word with usages “meaning” their opposite, due to the similarity of action or motion and not the outcome. Like bound, clip, weather or seed. The action is blurring things, the focus now in using the slash is then not on the outcome.
Outcomes are distracting, like shiny fetishes, dark mirrors for our souls.
Hopefully these blurs will be more/less than some list of connotations and cognates, at least the slashed group may indicate a co-evolving set or a hint of co-relatedness e.g. predator/prey/parasite. In a way the blur indicates that things are/may-be less than the sum of their parts.
In slashing together, the “blur” thus formed/thought is not a holism, and not a reductionism. It seeks to do more than those approaches by doing less than either claim. As a re-framing it answers/questions and asks/slaps mu4.
I use the slash to indicate these slashed elements or items are outcome/s of some other process or thing— that, perhaps, we can only see the ashes or remains of, the maybe ghosts of/fossilised absence/spaces in the stone-work where the original wooden church was built against in building the new stone church that is now a thousand years old. The ghost of echoes. See Devining the… —gap.
When we slash a blur, we epistemologically hold a fossil in our hands, like a thought on our tongues.
Words, as an example of this, are fossils of their usage in grammaticalisation. Usage maintains them, usages changes them, usage wears them out, usages fills the gaps with sediment and the remains of the routine of the day, usage fossilises this in turn, usages changes usage, and sets them into grammar, and that is all we have of the past that we hold in our tongues in the world we live in where we hold meetings every live long day.
A taphonomy of sound and kisses, lips smacking at a meal.
Smacznego!
This blurring of hard won divisions allows an examination of the processes in evolution/history by which those divisions arose and evolved/become useful and/or extinct, or not/not even wrong.
For example world/morality/religion/state/country/landscape.
Once upon a time they were all the same ‘thing/meeting’. History determines otherwise. It’s a problem, it’s a thing now. Anthropological and historical literature seem to constantly point this out. This has little input into our culture, the number of peeps trying to explain each element on their lonesome-ownsome. This is partly the result of specialization and publisher and platform penchants for wanting a category-killer, or just departmental politics. But these killers are right mothers of all categories. Often the authors try to squeeze out away from these jails/gaols.
We all do our best.
I hope to provide hints of a methodology to do some slash-and-burning of categories. They grow like weeds in disturbed soil of our thinking/moving/making/doing. Worlding.
(NOTE TO SELF:I’ll have a whole section on the blur at some later stage.)
Footnotes
1 Occasionally I’ll throw in a back slash to highlight a central term to the discussion, perhaps in order to cuddle it. I.E. mother/child\love.
2Sometimes “slash” as a word is used like a verbal em dash — to break up and shift to some new topic. Often in this case, it is used to say aloud a notice of a discontinuity.
3 The usage thus blurred can become a thing: worklife balance, when the slash is no longer there. These things are unlikely to be objects per se, but are their furry animist mind-thing the “concept”, which the slash joins in a blur to newness/oneness. However the slash can also blur into oldness. Blurring into oldness-es in the ancestor undifferentiates the god/giant\monsters, the ancient, out of which the process of individuation comes later. In the ancient nothing is special, that comes later, in the now perhaps, as that “then-ness” it has come before and is unknown. See Raymond Williams Keywords. With/in these two usages of the slash/e\s — novelty and ancienty can be a bit of a blur themselves.
4 My usage of mu comes from reading, in 1984, Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Penguin, 1980.
This follows up from Cormac Orthography, more or less
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see other punctuation discussions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njYJXVFcGmw