Thoughts that were duct taped to my cerebrum

the irony of density

no timberlake pictures yet as they are all still safely tucked into the teeny weeny memory card on the camera. i’ll get them off there eventually… i think.

anyways yesterday i was thinking about the irony of density. (not to be confused with the irony of dentistry, which i also experienced yesterday.) i was thinking about the term “dense” and how we use it to describe slow people. Suddenly i realized that didn’t make sense to me. i’ve been studying density in chem, and the definition my book gives is “An object’s mass divided by the volume that the object occupies”, which is a pretty technical definition. but i guess i always think of it as, density is kind of like how much “stuff” (molecules and whatnot) is crowded in. Now if you ask me, if someone has alot of “stuff” in their brain i might call them dense, but i would mean it as well-learned and full of ideas, because a smart or creative or lively person has more “stuff” floating around in their brains. Yet we call stupid people (or people we perceive to be stupid - don’t get me started on perceptions) dense! …

Besides the fact that saying smart people are “dense” because they have more stuff in their heads actually changes the definition of “stuff” from molecules and junk to valuable information, my family had input against my point as well. They told me that this was because if someone is dense by the current socially inspired definition, it is “hard to get through to them”, or they are considered thick skulled, which makes perfect sense according to density in chem. for example, vegetable oil floats on top of water because vegetable oil is dense enough that water molecules can’t squeeze through and fall underneath it. so if a person were dense, thoughts would presumably not be able to squeeze through their heads and reach their brains properly. HOWEVER, if this were really what makes a dense person dense, then we shouldn’t confine the term dense to just the people who are currently considered dense!!! … sorry. what i mean is, if a dense person is anyone who is hard to get through to, then the term “dense” would apply to not only the slower of mind, but also to the narrow-minded who do not listen, to the children who do not wish to listen, to teenagers who don’t care to listen, and to people with hearing problems who quite literally cannot listen. in fact it would probably apply to most of us, since it’s a given that every one of us has an issue upon which we won’t hear any input or advice.

i am definitely not saying we should just run around calling everyone dense (with its current connotations that might be bad), but we English-speaking people are so weird.

Alicia <3

Tags: dense, density, irony