Existential threat. This phrase annoys me. I know what people are getting at, which is that they think that its a cool way of saying that X is a threat to the existence of Y. Often this is used in the context of the Mideast. However, existentialism is a serious school of philosophy. I dont subscribe to its major tenets, but I spent a lot of time studying it. Broadly speaking, its a theory that a persons future is not determined, that anything can happen, that one must project himself or herself into the void. If it sounds pessimistic, thats because it is. Existentialism best expresses itself in literature, particularly in French. Probably the two most influential works are La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre and Letranger by Albert Camus. If your French is rusty, the English translations are good -- but the nuance of them comes out a little better in French. Whatever. Just read them in whatever language you like before you use this phrase. This is grating on my nerves almost to the degree that X begs the question does. Question begging is not a synonym for question posing or raising. Question begging is a sort of circular argument in which posing the question implicitly answers it. While Im on this subject of misusage, penultimate does not mean super ultimate it means second to last. And you are not going to lay out in the late summer sun, youre going to lie out in the late summer sun. The former refers to something that you are going to do to something else. Im going to lay out the silverware on the picnic table. Good. Im going to lie out by the pool. Good again. So when someone says that Hamas is an existential threat to Israel, I take it that the speaker does not mean that Hamas is threatening to force all of Israel to read Being and Nothingness (a book that Sartre wrote while on speed -- but thats another discussion). Im too tired to go into the substitution of the reflexive pronoun for the second person pronoun. Thats a subject for another day.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 03:18:19 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015