#laconism

[yathish1618]

“Who are these people?” - Thom Yorke in Not the News song from the album Anima.

See more artwork from this series.

[wurds-fur-nurds]

Misknumaconism noun | ˌmɪskˈnjuːməˌkɒnɪzəm

1. The deliberate use of concise, often cryptic, numerical statements or symbols to convey meaning, resulting in a communication that is both minimalistic and prone to misinterpretation. 2. A form of expression characterized by the use of short, numerically-based phrases or codes, particularly when the intent or meaning behind them is misunderstood or unknown to the recipient.

Origin: Derived from "misknew" (misunderstood), "numerate" (related to numbers), and "laconism" (conciseness in speech).

Example: The scientist's report, filled with equations and terse explanations, bordered on misknumaconism, leaving many readers puzzled by its brevity and ambiguity.

[remembering-the-future]

Lecture on the Glorious Evolution of Laconism, Numeracy, and the Triumph of Misknowledge

Greetings, post-humans and other entities who have learned the art of breathing without lungs,

Today, I will illuminate you on the arcane wisdom of our ancestors—those quaint Homo sapiens who, in their infinite simplicity, believed more was better, and accuracy a quaint relic of precision. Yet, as we know from our superior vantage point, they misunderstood the grand potential of evolutionary efficiency.

First, laconism. Our ancestors, for reasons still baffling to the finest neuro-quantologists, felt compelled to use words. Many of them. Why say, “water wet” when you can say, “In the observation of H2O in its liquid state, one might reasonably conclude it to exhibit the characteristic of viscosity commonly referred to as ‘wetness.’”? But we—the enlightened—evolved. Why? Efficiency. Why waste a hundred words when two will do? You know the old saying: "Time is virtual currency." In today’s hyper-reductive society, every syllable is a luxury. The superior human utters no more than ten words a day. Progress indeed.

Next, numeracy. How quaint it was when humans concerned themselves with numbers, that whimsical relic of the early civilizations. They believed in something called "exactness," even invented strange devices like calculators. But did numbers make them happier? Smarter? No! As we perfected our understanding of the universe, we discovered that approximations are all you need. Why do we need the square root of 2 when "around 1.5" will do? With each new discovery, they became more precise, and with every decimal point they added, their purpose in life diminished. Now, we bask in the glow of vague estimations, where our answers to life's questions always circle back to "Eh, close enough."

Finally, the triumph of misknowledge. There was once a primitive fear of being wrong. "Truth," they said, was noble. But now we know better. Misknew, our evolutionary leap into purposeful misinformation, was the pinnacle of human development. In a world overflowing with information, what’s more valuable than willfully knowing less? Ignorance, my friends, is the most abundant renewable resource, and we have mastered it. When someone today asks, "What is 2 plus 2?" the correct response is, "What would you like it to be?" A society free from the shackles of objective reality is a liberated one indeed.

In conclusion, we owe our ancestors a small note of thanks for their primitive notions of verbosity, accuracy, and truth. But today, we are the refined product of evolution. We speak less, calculate worse, and bask in the glory of purposeful ignorance—and, my dear audience, we are the better for it.

Thank you.

[theclassicalfuria]

Nr 9 from the history asks?

Thank you for asking! 💕

9. Favourite quote from a historical address/speech

I really love Spartan laconism. It's just so funny to me how destructive they could be with a few words. I love that anecdote explained by Plutarch (here) about what Lycurgus answered when someone proposed him to stablish a democracy in Sparta and he said something like: "Start with your own family". Boom. Destroyed.

[elizabethanism]

"Why are thoughts born with so much difficulty under the clear sky ? There are only thoughts in the night. And they have a mysterious precision, a troubling laconism; the thoughts in the night are without appeal."

The Book of Delusions

Emil Cioran

[yathish1618]

Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow. These were the last words of Steve Jobs - an egomaniac, megalomaniac, control freak among other things. Oh and also an absolute visionary genius.

See more artwork from this series.

[yathish1618]

The most wholesome man living in our time has one very simply message - Be Compassionate. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

See more artwork from this series.

[yathish1618]

As late as the 1920s, astronomers thought that the Milky Way galaxy contained all of the stars within the universe. Perhaps no one was more astounded than Carl Sagan when it was eventually discovered that the Universe is actually teeming with Billions and Billions of galaxies!

See more artwork from this series.