Why is it called Chilli if it's hot?
Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
Unanswered Questions in Life
- Thread starter Empoleon_master
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Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
Chili was what the natives called the plant for whatever reason. Because we could pronounce it, we didn't change it.
Chill[y] came from the German/old English word 'cele', which changed over time.
Because you're from America and America is upside down. xP (We drive on driveways in Australia. :v)
Something that's kinda come to mind recently: Why is it that in literacy, people always like reading about characters that go through tough things and basically get pooped on for plot and character development? I mean, I write characters like that (two in particular kinda fall under my question; kudos if you can name them), but when you think about it, we're enjoying the suffering of fictional characters. Imagine if you were in their place... Pretty sure it wouldn't be the same.
1) Language isn't decided or made by anyone. I'll make it simple: in linguistics, there's a basic unit of language called the Linguistic Sign; it is, essentially, a combination of an acoustic image and a meaning, and there's no logical or natural relation between the acoustic part (signifier) and the meaning of the sign (signified); Ferdinand de Saussure, on his first study of linguistics, named this "arbitratieness", meaning that language doesn't have any kind of preexistence; it's all random.
Similarly, Saussure points out that language, as a whole, isn't determined by any single person, and is ummodifiable at any single point in time; but he also, paradoxically, perhaps, points out that language does change, but not by any person's or small group of people's bidding, but organically, over great periods of time.
4) Normality is a sociological concept; essentially you could say that yes, "normal" is a simplified version of "usual"; it's easy to see that nothing is truly normal, but it's practical to just group things by their similarities; why some similarities take precedence over others, well, that's a much harder question to answer, and often linked to numerous cultural, historical and psychological reasons.
5) Really? everyone sees the world through their own lenses, guided by their own subjectivity; it's hard to think of something that wouldn't cause different impressions on different people; they're different, after all. There isn't a single objective thing, just several subjective views of the same thing, which might or might not concur.
6) I'm sure there's an answer in some branch of cognitive psychology, probably something about evolutionary advantages; I would usually scoff to such an answer, but in this case, it feels correct to take as such; the basic emotions (anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise and joy, I believe) all have a practical, real-world utility, and over time and as humans gained intelligence beyond that of a normal animal and became able to control their natural impulses, emotions also expanded into other, less life-sustaining functions, to fit with man's new social environment.
7) Normality defines what isn't normal. It's... in the word. And it also defines the answer; in the early 18th century mental illness was lobotomized away; nowadays, many people live with mental illnesses of those kind without needing so much as treatment (others take pills, others are committed, etc). There's an interesting text by Michel Foucault on alienation and mental illness that briefly touches on this.
8) Innumerable reasons that came up as a result of a complex socio-historical process that started since the first humans that settled in a single place?
9) Why wouldn't we? as many, many, many mistakes it has made in the way, humanity has come a long way since it started. The same answer applies here; the line between power and self-improvement is very unclear, and the way society evolved never quite shook off that competitive streak that is humanity's best and worst tool. Capitalism (that is, most of the developed world) holds self-sufficiency and competition as key principles of society and economy, to different degrees, and american society holds them in a particularly important place in the collective consciousness.
Tradition and practicality; it would be pandemonium if every single person wouldn't ascribe to a social contract and would strive to exert his own power, not in the least because people clash all the time; imagine how much worse that would be if they didn't give up their power to exert violence to others. I mean, you don't have to imagine, it's very usual and very terrible already, just, imagine it everywhere.
10) Again, practicality. Try to go through your life without trusting a single person; you would die after you didn't let your mother give you your milk. Oh, right, and there's that little thing about man being a social animal and such, so it is inevitable. Little detail.
Tell me, is life easy to you? it's a rhetorical question, you don't need to answer; the point is that growth comes from difficulty; unless you're forced to improve, you won't improve; there's a lot of discussion to be had regarding the limits of that difficulty in fiction, but regardless, the audience is always supposed to identify and, yes, put themselves in the character's place; it's that suffering-by-proxy what makes the growth rewarding.
You didn't read "The Adventures of the Great Harry Potter the Boy who was the Best at Everything and had a really happy life forever" after all, didn't you? you read "the adventures of harry potter the boy who was consistently and almost ridiculously surrounded by death, evil and chaos until the day he beat it and finally got his happy ending after who knows how many books". Nobody likes a mary sue, or an uneventful story.
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could be for the "catharsis", as in audience sees the protagonist go through some horrible experience and feel pity or disgust, then they'd be able to deal with the bad feels in a safe environment
And ver in Latin means spring...
...so I guess that makes me a "chilly spring"?
In addition to what the two people above me have said, I think that fictional characters having suffering is basically just a result of the story having some kind of length or meaning. Humans have a habit of categorising everything into "good" or "bad", and so a story made up entirely of "good" things really has very little room to grow and as such it would get very boring very quickly. The reader's interest in the book would flatline hard and the book wouldn't be remembered.
Furthermore, characters need to be at least a little relatable. No one has ever had a perfect life, or, more to the point, no one has ever felt like they've had a good life for 100% of it. Everyone experiences hardships, and seeing a fictional character doing well out of every situation... that just makes the whole scenario more fictional.