Language

Vis-a-vis? I don't know what that means. I could look it up and tomorrow, I still wouldn't know what it meant. I have a mental block against the words vis-a-vis, qua, factors of anything and hueristic. I encounter these words in many scholarly write ups and my emergency happy face override kicks in and says, "Hey, whatever it means, it doesn't matter to you or your style of life. Doan worry bout it." So I don't.

Vis a vis is in WEBSTER'S dictionary. It means several things.

1. face to face
2. face to face with
3. opposite
4. in relation to
5. as compared with
6. counter-part
7. in company
8. escort or date
9. together
10. one that is face to face with another.

From the instruction manual:

Your new body is equipped with an Emergency Happy Face Override option which allows you to ignore things you can't, wouldn't or will never understand. When this option is active you can successfully understand things that otherwise would be unintelligible. For example, when reading the last sentence, the Emergency Happy Face Override allows you to understand the idea as "When this option is active you can successfully understand things that otherwise would be (happy face here)." Un is not. Telligible sounds kind of like intellegent. Emergency Happy Face Override interpretation, "Using the Emergency Happy Face Override you can understand things you otherwise couldn't." Or at least you can make something up in the interim that will satify and suffice.

So using the Emergency Happy Face Override, you can ignore words like hueristic. Like the following sentence:

"The hueristic learnings of a society are crucial to its survival. "

Can be interpreted as:

"The (happy face) learnings of a society are crucial to its survival. "

or even,

"A society's gotta learn to keep going."

And so on.

We should applaud when someone uses archaic or foriegn terms in an English sentence to indicate that we noticed that they used the terms.

People who had to learn Latin, like doctors and lawyers are angry about this. So they make sure the use it whereever possible to punish the rest of us. With lawyers, this is obvious. Try reading any legal document. Nolo contendre indeed! Doctors are a little more subtle. They just name diseases with Latin names. They are also vain, because they include their name in the disease as well. Now who the heck would want a disease named after them? I'm sure Dr. Parkinson is sorry he ever did that.

Other people who learn Latin (their excuse is often that the English language is based on Latin) feel the need to punish the rest of us by sneaking Latin phrases in whereever they can. "E Pluribus Unim" , "Carpe Diem" etc.