Today, across the dailies
Three daily surfaces I run, each on its own audience — a word and where it came from, a U.S. patent worth looking at, a paradox worth re-reading. Three independent rotations; this page is the editorial home that pulls today's pick from each. The dailies live where their readers find them; this is where they sit together.
rehearse
To rehearse is to go over a thing again before its real performance — to run the lines, walk the blocking, practice the speech. The word is, at the root, agricultural: Old French <em>rehercier</em>, "to harrow again," from <em>herce</em>, a harrow — the spiked frame dragged across a plowed field to break the clods and even the soil. To rehearse is to drag the rake back over ground you have already worked: a second pass over the same earth. The funeral <em>hearse</em> is the harrow's sibling — it began as a harrow-shaped frame of spikes set with candles over a coffin. And the farm implement called a <em>harrow</em> in English is, despite being the same tool, a false friend: a separate Germanic word. The word for practice is a word for re-tilling — working the same field a second time until it lies right.
Method of exercising a cat
A real, granted U.S. patent for shining a laser pointer at your cat. The drawings show stick-figure humans aiming a small box at a stick-figure cat mid-leap. The patent is enforceable until 2015 (it has since expired). The USPTO has, in the years since, become more skeptical of method patents over commonplace activity — but for two decades, technically, you owed Amiss and Abbott royalties.
The Sorites
One grain of sand isn’t a heap. Adding a single grain to a non-heap doesn’t make a heap. Therefore no heap exists.
Heaps obviously exist. So one of the two innocent-looking premises must be false, and neither obviously is. The Sorites is the central problem of vagueness. Most predicates we actually use — “tall,” “rich,” “old,” “bald,” “alive” — have no sharp boundary, but classical logic insists every predicate must. Three lines of response: reject classical logic for vague terms, accept fuzzy degrees of truth, or accept (with Williamson’s epistemicism) that the sharp lines exist but we cannot know where. The political form of the puzzle (“how many votes constitute consent,” “at what week does a fetus become a person”) is structurally identical and just as unresolved.