Not A Blog™

[This classic Not A Blog™ article was originally published on October 4, 2004.]

I’ve come to the conclusion that the more words used to discuss a particular topic, the less those words mean. By extension, this means that if you ramble on about something to infinity, you will have said nothing at all.

Wait: incomplete. I forgot to include the size of the subject one is discussing. The more specific the subject, the less each word means the more you talk about it. The more general the subject, means the word-meaning factor degenerates less.

Just for kicks, let’s see if I can express that mathematically…



There we are. That’s where Mw is the meaning of the words, collectively; Sp is the specificity of the subject being discussed; and W is the number of words. Naturally this equation would generate two answers; the negative one would be discarded.

One more thing: we need to make up some quantities here, since these things aren’t exactly measurable. (This is very scientific as I’m sure you can tell.) I would say that a medium-specific subject would earn a value of 1. More specific subjects would earn a higher value; less specific subjects get a lower one. A suitable medium-specific subject would be, say… transportation (Sp = 1). More specific would be zeppelins (Sp = 5); less specific would be technology (Sp = .5). Other very general topics include politics, religion, philosophy; all that sort of “boring” stuff which people try to stay away from in conversation among friends. Specific topics, however, include individual TV shows, or, for that matter, individual characters in certain TV shows, or certain events in particular TV shows. Political topics, such as war, are less specific, but still more general than the overall heading of politics. I could probably go on forever quantifying all this stuff, but I’ll let that up to someone with considerably more time on their hands.

The point is, if you have a very specific subject (say for example, minimalism (Sp = 34)) which you talk about ad nauseum, the meaning of the collective number of words you wrote would be very small.

On the other hand, if you talk about a very nebulous, broad subject (say, philosophy (Sp = .1)) but do so with only a few choice phrases, the meaning of each word would be off the chart.

It would be easy, then, to figure the mean amount of meaning each word receives, if you divide Mw by W.

Having scientifically quantified this vast amount of data, I’ve decided to apply it to this blog. I will no longer ramble on for paragraphs upon paragraphs about pointless crap such as cheesecake. No, from this point forward, this blog will only be discussing the esoteric topics: philosophy, the meaning of life, the question “why”, and so forth. However, I will do so a single, powerful word at a time. I will distill my argument down the bare essentials, driving my point home with a calculated force of extremely high word-meaning. In fact, I would recommend that the lesser members of my loyal audience stop reading this blog, lest your heads explode with an uncontrollable influx of knowledge which shall be contained daily in the single word I choose to state. Prepare yourself, for the most comprehensive writings of all time.

Monday, October 8, 2004:

Insubstantial.

-Ted