[WikiEN-l] Little Napoleans

[phoebe ayers]

On 1/13/07, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
>
> > From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
> >
> > On 1/13/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
> >> 'I've run afoul of the rules lawyers on Wikipedia many times. It's
> >> getting to the point where >you can't even say the sky is blue
> >> without one of these little Napoleans squawking, "Original
> >> >research! Need citation!"'
> >
> > Problem is whith that classic example is that the sky often isn't
> > blue. It spends a fair bit of time being black with white bits.
> > Depending on where you are grey may be popular and red/pink may appear
> > as much as twice a day.
>
> Yeah, and remember the song from South Pacific: "When the sky is a
> bright canary yellow/I forget every cloud I've ever seen./So they
> call me a cockeyed optimist,/Immature and incurably green..."
>
> Actually, I've been brooding about this topic since it came up last
> year, and I've been troubled by the meta-question:
>
> WHY is "the sky is blue" taken as the emblematic unchallengeable
> fact, since it's not even close to being true?
>
> I think the answer is that we've been brainwashed by being _told_ in
> elementary school that "the sky is blue," and we continue to believe
> it as having some quality of magical truth to it, even though we can
> see with our own eyes that it is false.


Or perhaps because when the sky *is* blue, it's so universally true: it
doesn't take any formal training or cultural reference or even particularly
sharp observation skills to determine that the sky is a particular color,
and to eventually figure out that color is associated with the absence of
clouds and storms. I'm reaching here, being no meteorologist, but I'd
imagine that every person everywhere who can see the sky has at some point
in their life seen it be a blue color. If true, this then is closer than
most things to being an universal shared external experience. Sky color is a
convenient reference (it's always there, after all), and thus a highly
convenient metaphor: it's not that anyone is literally talking about the
sky, any more than a child's drawing is a completely accurate portrait of
something. It's rather a good way to insert {{universally recognized
metaphor here so you have some idea of how I feel about this other thing
that I'm actually talking about}}, only in less words. Rather than wonder at
how children learn to view the world in colors, I'm amazed by how kids pick
up verbal metaphors and symbolism so easily.
-- phoebe

-- 
phoebe ayers | brassratgirl /at/ gmail.com |
"Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function." --
Alberto Manguel