(Almost) everything is arbitrary!

April 28, 2025

When does a comet become a meteor? When does a candle become a blaze? When does a man become a monster?

When does a ripple become a tidal wave? When does the reason become the blame? When does a man become a monster?

Just a Man, Troy Saga, EPIC: The Musical

Those aren’t just lines from the song Just a man, the 2nd track of the 40-song-spanning conceptual musical EPIC - a ripping, rythmic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey that you should go and watch / listen to now -, but they are also a trigger.

They were a trigger for me to realize something about the myself, my thinking, and the world.

Something - I now know - I lie importance upon, when learning something like a new concept / way to handle something / idea, is, how it is different from / relates to similiar ideas. The question of at which point one should rather speak of it instead of speaking of the other thing is crucial to learn the ideas defining attributes.

So, how does for example an acronym differ from an initialism? Why are they so often confused? Both are words to describe a abbreviation consisting of the first (few) letter(s), the initials, of the abbreviated word or phrase. But while acronyms are pronouncable, i.e. form another word like NASA, initialisms are not, so each letter is said seperately, like in DFTBA (Don’t forget to be awesome) or BBC. Looking at many definitions, however, often only the first part, i.e. the the thing that is common among both acronyms and initialisms, that they are formed by initials is described, while the pronoucability is forgotten.

So the crucial attributes defining something and making it different are only visible, when compared to similiar ideas.

Seeing this, one might think that these differantiating features are important, thereby, however, it is often forgotten that these lines are completely arbitrary only made up by what some human mind thought of looking at seperately or thought would make. Examples for this behavior include things, like 18 being the entry to adulthood or the size at which a big rock floating in space is rather called a planet, like our Earth, instead of a dwarf planet, like Pluto, or the entirity of law making a close call between what behaviour is legal and what isn’t. But especially with the last example mentioned we often seem to forget their arbitrarity, accepting things that in reality can be changed as a given.

If humanity should one day face a global threat, cough cough climate change, facism, war cough cough I hope we don’t just accept our demise as a given.

P.S.: I swear, I didn’t do any drugs, before writing this.