Sayings

“Water under the bridge.”

Sayings

In E.B. White’s language style book, Strunk and White, he states that, the fewer cliches a piece of writing uses, the better. However, it seems to me like people naturally incorporate repeated phrases into their language. In fact, even LLMs seem to have their own preferred set of phrases.

For instance, ChatGPT loves to say “delve” and it’s instantly recognizable when some piece of writing has AI-like features because even if you tell it not to sound like AI, it simply can’t help it¹.

People also have unique patterns. For example, when Jerma985 goes to the grocery store and almost bumps into someone, he says “Careful, traffic!”

Traffic

Another kind of voice-line that everyone also seems to have their own greetings, like I usually say “What’s up” or “Yo.”

NPCs

This may seem like “NPC behavior,” but I think that something that it defines each person’s unique identity.

I remember clearly in Pokemon X & Y, how the NPC friends/rivals gave the player a choice in what nickname they should call the player. One of the options was “Meister,” which I had never heard before and still don’t know the meaning of, but the way it sounded seemed to gel with my preferences at the time.

Accepted meaning

There is a saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” which I often quote incorrectly as, “No man ever walks the same path twice,” or “Nobody ever eats the same Red Door quesadilla twice.”

However, I feel like my version is better because using the imagery of a river implies that it is the river that changes and all the water from before has moved into the sea, but my version is more suited to a younger audience, where the person is the one that changes.

But maybe this is all just water under the bridge.

Salt

Haruki Murakami’s memoir, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” starts with a fake saying:

There’s a wise saying that goes like this: A real gentleman never discusses women he’s broken up with or how much tax he’s paid. Actually, this is a total lie. I just made it up. Sorry! But if there really were such a saying, I think that one more condition for being a gentleman would be keeping quiet about what you do to stay healthy.

I think this is an interesting point, because the existence of sayings implies that they are truthful, by some kind of natural selection over time which removes useless sayings from the public consciousness.

However, since all sayings were once not-sayings (is this a chicken-and-the-egg issue or a cart-before-the-horse issue?), perhaps we should take them with a grain of salt.

The Sandwich Method

DMO often discussed using the sandwich method for giving feedback, which is giving some nice feedback, criticism in the middle, and ending with a compliment.

I learned from my classmate Y that in China there is also a sandwich method, except for writing essays, where you put a famous saying at the start and end of the essay, and BS in between.

Water Under the Bridge

Just as no man steps in the same river twice, when Murakami said, “Time had passed, students had come and gone, I’d aged ten years, and there’d literally been a lot of water under the bridge,” I got the image of integrating the flux of water through the plane cutting across the river, and generating the volume of a very long tube of water.

I hadn’t really thought deeply about the saying, “Water under the bridge,” henceforth referred to as WUTB, before this, but getting the picture in my head really gives me a better understanding of the true meaning of the saying.

And I think this is the intended effect, because when something is repeated enough, it loses some of its original meaning and takes on a new meaning in meme form.

WUTB, as it’s used in America, usually implies forgiving others’ past mistakes, rather than representing the passage of time, and since Murakami is Japanese, WUTB probably carries some kind of different meaning in Japan relating to time.

Autumn In New York

Murakami also writes about the song “Autumn In New York,” where he points out the line, “It’s autumn in New York / It’s good to live it again.”

According to Wikipedia, Vernon Duke actually composed the song in Westport, CT, which is quite the coincidence.

I was going to write, “I quite like autumn in the east coast compared to LA,” but I actually quite like autumn in LA as well, because it brings back nostagic memories, even though the colors are duller than those of New England.

Memory

I was watching some YouTube videos about The Iliad to supplement my reading of the book and one video said that it is very hard to read the story because it was meant to be spoken/heard.

“Wouldn’t it be really hard to memorize the whole book?” Is a natural thought, but DMO memorized all of Hamlet and a large portion of Moby Dick, so I think it’s not unreasonable that someone specialized in memorizing stories could memorize The Iliad.

Also, a big complaint that some people have about pop music is that it’s too repetitive, but I actually think that The Iliad is even more repetitive than most pop music nowadays.

One who teaches

Teaching can be compared to Hanzel and Gretel, is what my old math teacher Mr. P told me, because the teacher’s job is to leave crumbs along the way and have the student arrive at the destination.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink,” is what he may have felt in at least one of the classes that he taught.

My roommate E asked me at Browne dining hall if teaching will even be around in a few years because AI is going to replace teachers. This makes no sense because of teacher’s unions and also I don’t think anyone would trust AI to teach kids.

ADC

I’ve been playing ADC instead of jungle and it’s been quite a good experience because…

One day after I wrote the above line, I now revise my statement. Playing solo queue has been a mixed bag. On one hand, it is nice to improve my play, on the other, I need to deal with the shameless grown children on my team who don’t want to win.

XFN Saber, an educational ADC content creator, has said that the mark of a bad player is attempting to argue iwth your teammates. I wholeheartedly agree with this statement because it is not one’s job to fix other people’s mistakes, but rather to work on resolving your own.

After a series of poor games, I was more inclined to read than to play. I believe this is the best part of LoL, because it encourages you to stop playing by its frustrating nature.

Also, never play at night, just play during 3-6 or don’t play.

Footnotes

1. Or so I’ve heard. ↩