Like so many giants, gods, and ancient Chinese warriors, I too stand in front of a gate attempting to stop things from getting through. My struggle is much more ephemeral then some others, and with most of the previous examples being wholly mythological or fictitious that really is saying something, but my struggle is equally important and more prone to failure. Surely language should in some fashion be given a chance to stand tall under the withering lashes of a million fools!

I mentioned last time a brief overture of the study of language and its many convoluted tidbits. Today I would like to expound upon the death of those same bits. Not a glorious or purposeful death, like those found in Deconstruction, but the lame and coughing from the depths of the lungs horrible black gunk right before pitching headlong on the lawn death. The death of too many poorly made decisions and not enough time spent buttressing the internal fortitude of the body.

Binary opposition, to recap, is the idea that terms are defined, in part, by the contrasts they have with each other. We understand to what extent something is cold by understanding to what extent it is not hot.

Which would be much easier if both cool and hot were not co-opted for use in modern culture as terms with positive values. Someone who is paradoxically cool and hot is the epitome of young adult achievement. And if you think you intellectuals, who shun notions of ‘hotness’ are free from committing this crime I ask you, when was the last time you were attracted to someone who was very intelligent but also depressed? Bright and dark? Why yes, that would be you committing a linguistic assassination.

But these examples are more playful too me then they are devastating. As Saussure would say this is all part of the ‘play’ that words engage in that gives them some form of real physicality.

The phrases that I am here to wag my mental stick at and demand that the collective majority repair are far more grave, far more sinister, by far more brutal and diseased. Will you take up arms with me and stab your pike into the dark heart of confusion and disinformation?

I’m up for it! Are you down?

How? How? HOW!? How did we allow this to happen? In what way can I be up for an activity that you are down for? Where did we take a turn down a primitive back road and have we stopped since these warning signs popped up? If not, then I assume we are soon to hurtle off of a cliff and over a waterfall into simian grunts and crude hand gestures that will alert me to the presence of mammoth, over yon hill, where the ice meets the horizon and where Dave took that spill last week that still has him laying about the cave floor and honestly who is going to take care of his five kids if we don’t go over there and use these pointy sticks to carve out a reckoning of tusk and hair and bring back the meat? For Dave! For his children. For all those times when the mammoth laugh at us when we try to ride them.

You can actually glean a surprising amount of information out of some grunts and hand gestures if you apply a little indignation and a wild tale of a caveman named Dave. But I would not recommend it the next time you want your car repaired or are asking your boss for a few hours off to go see the dentist.

My ire for the use of ‘I’m up for it’ and ‘I’m down’ meaning the same thing is perhaps that outside of a lack of semiotic sense and breaking the principle of binary opposition, they are also prepositions. The lowest of all words, prepositions occupy the same evolutionary rung as the Yugo, the Brick (by which I mean those old cell phones that were larger then any home phone you are likely to have ever owned), and the pet rock. Certainly these objects are amusing and possibly even necessary for the invention of superior objects such as gerunds, the BMW, a slide phone, and a tamigachi, but they are in enough trouble as relics of a form of communication in which spatial relationships were of key importance to meaning without being bastardized into terms that demonstrate a sort of psychological or emotional spacial relevance to the attitude necessary to be involved in a task.

You see, that last sentence just falls apart as I struggle to find words that will fit around the particularly nasty and ever-growing carcass of this problem as if it were a highly unstable Japanese boy who went of his meds and decided to destroy chunks of Tokyo to overcome his crippling self-doubt from years of being under-appreciated and picked upon. This is not the sort of carcass you want to see growing on the horizon. Especially not at 3 am when all of your friends have fallen asleep and you are left to deal with this sight solo.

But perhaps that is more of a personal problem.