language in service to revelation or encapsulated in dyadic

Jim Woods (TrlBlzrOne@AOL.COM)
Tue, 20 May 1997 20:50:32 -0400

........dyadic semiotic attempting to address triadic reality.....

"The bubble will be five thousand cubic feet. The available volume in the
upper head and candy canes, that's' the hot legs is on the order of two
thousand cubic feet. I got three thousand excess cubic feet of
non-condensables. I've got a horse race. We got every systems engineer we can
find thinking the problem. How in the hell did we get the non-condensables
out of there? Do we win the horse race or do we lose the horse race?'

The words above were addressed to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff by
an operator at Three-Mile Island as that plant went critical and threatened
to melt down as coolant escaped from the main reactor and pressure mounted in
the containment vessel....

Their character seems to me similar to technical/bureaucratic jargon which
seeks to hide the meaning of events or hide the actions that are being taken,
especially from those most likely to be affected by said
actions/events......locutions such as 'mistakes were made'......'terminate
with extreme prejudice'.....or perhaps one of the supreme moments of 20th
century hubris, the designation of the building and exploding of the first
atomic bomb as 'Trinity'--physicists claiming to be God-like. Or my all time
favorite example of true sentimentality and hubris wrapped up into one--
'safe sex', an oxymoron if there ever was one <G>; all of these locutions
lull us into o thinking we are 'in control' when, in fact, we deny ourselves
the recognition that would make such control possible, allow us to see when
we have crossed thresholds where 'control' cannot be expected to work in
reliable and dependable ways....'atoms for peace'....that was supposed to get
the genie back in the bottle......its still out there somewhere.....<G>

I think that language such as this is a classic example of the way in which
dyadic thought, not only denies humans insight into the transcendent
character of human life, but also endangers mankind by making accurate
practical moral judgements much harder...something I think Percy recognized
explicitly both in Lost in the Cosmos and in Thanatos Syndrome....

Jim