My mood is okay but I’m too lethargic to write new material for a post, and have something for this one originally intended for yesterday’s post I can take care of it with, so will!  It’s a response to someone name Nico (Nico V.?) who responded to my complaint about the use of the word, “myth,” for “fallacy” with “When does a fallacy become a myth though? There are plenty of ‘common knowledge’ ideas that are false, but they are so pervasive I wouldn’t be shy to call them myths at this point”:

I remember wonderful times as a child (beginning in childhood, I should say) reading myths about Perseus and Jason and Persephone. All fallacious and pervasive, like pervasive, false “common knowledge” but hugely differing from them in (1) having come to be stories accepted as false by everyone encountering them which are employed to transcend our knowledge of the world as it really is and (2) having an archetypal significance that makes them far more interesting, entertaining and useful than the generally trivial beliefs and misbeliefs those opposed to them feel the need to call “myths.”

In short, “myth” is too valuable a word to waste (in this case) on Chomsky’s linguistic theory regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, widely accepted or widely ignored.  (I myself believe it’s more right than wrong, incidentally, but that’s irrelevant.  I also believe, for example, that it’s absurd to call the United States a free country, but would never say that its characterization as such is a myth.  It is fallacious.  What we have is a country that is part free, part socialist–which, of course, makes it more nearly a free country than most other countries, but does not make it a free country.)

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I’m always feeling more words than we have are needed, even for simple things that have gotten along with just a few words for a long time.  For instance, I now want an adjective to describe something that is . . . “brand-new,” and I guess that’s it.  I want to distinguish such a things from something that has been new for a while.  Visual poetry has been new for centuries, for instance, but only became importantly new a hundred years or so ago.  I guess it’s on the verge of being neither new nor old at the moment.

Note: I’ve decided I need to revise the poem I posted yesterday.  Too much gray in it.