Whatever. I’ll drop it and not contribute further to sidetracking this thread.
Here’s one common grade-school “lie” that sort of irks me: the idea that the definition of a noun is as a word referring to a “person, place, or thing”. I suppose it turns upon what one means by “thing”, but I can’t see any useful way to interpret this that’s also true. For instance, is truth a thing? Imagination? Fortitude? Hunger? A crunch or a bang? A jump? A cry? The future? Is “nothing” a thing? And if all of those are things (since all of those are, at least in those instances, nouns), if “thing” is not meant to refer to just tangible objects, but, indeed, can refer to, well, anything, then what use is this definition?
I had a 6th grade teacher once tell us that the “B.C” abbreviation used in dates stood for, “Before Christ” and that “A.D” stood for “After died”. We quickly corrected him as our 5th grade teacher taught us it was an abbreviation for the latin, “Anno Domini”.
I have to give him credit. He was quite open to being corrected and wasn’t arrogant at all about it. He was a great teacher too.
I had a CCD(Catholic sunday school) teacher tell us that, too! She couldn’t answer when we asked how, then, were the years when Christ was alive were referred to.
Well, at least there’s some recognition of the problem here, but all my rage at the fuzzy uselessness of “thing” applies just about as well to “idea”. You just can’t accurately define parts of speech on semantic grounds like this. You have to talk about syntactic roles; ability to be the subject of a sentence, for example (well, technically, we’ll want to draw a distinction between nouns and noun phrases, but I’ll set my aspirations low for the time being).
Why the hell do you think a person doing a job that needs doing, at the prevailing wage, doesn’t have dignity or is being degraded?
My father was a janitor and, while there’s no love lost between us, he was and is just as much of a human being being as anyone.
Do you have this idea of some people being less human and dignified, or degradable, because women have considered you to be ugly throughout your life? I’m just trying to figure out just where your pathologies are coming from.
Only if you accept that bedpan duty is “the most undignified work”. Anyway, I think we can all agree that GuyNblueJeans’s perspective here is warped, and thus we have no need to waste time hijacking the thread by responding to it.
“Ethics” is the subject. It is a noun and it refers to something intangible. That is my point; it is classified as a noun on syntactic grounds, rather than through any semantic analysis.
I chose the word “ethics” on purposes, because as a collection of rules, when brought to bear on human behavior, they do something, intangible or not. That, alone, makes them able to be the subject in the subject-action part of a sentence.
I’m definitely not a linguist, semiotician or whatever it would take to give you all the rules on this, but it makes sense to me.
Everyone considers me ugly. That’s the way it is, though painful it be.
We haven’t agreed to a definition of what’s “human,” so there’s no point in going around in circles about it. I’ll just say though that everyone doing work that helps themselves and others in the bigger picture is a HUMAN BEING loved by God. But like with anything, there are gradations … and so I personally woundn’t, for example, call a person lying in a coma for 20-years as being on par with someone that’s up and about and living a full and healthy life, even though technically (I think) they’re both human beings. I just wouldn’t.
I will not respond anymore to this issue as I don’t wish to offend the OP … just wanted to make one last response 'cause I saw that you made a comment about me avoiding your question (when I somehow missed seeing it).
You don’t need to be able to “do something”, in the sense of a “concrete” action (more of this fuzziness, I suppose), to be able to serve as a subject. Consider, say, “Triangles have three sides” or “Asteroids resemble comets” or “Cleanliness is next to godliness”.
What makes a word able to serve as the subject of a sentence has just about nothing to do with what that word refers to and everything to do with purely syntactic properties of the word. “Hunger” is a noun, while “hungry” is not; “Cleanliness” is a noun, while “clean” is not.
Actually it makes a lot of sense. Four cylinder engines have two crank throws spaced 180 degrees apart. Four cylinder engines have lots of vibrations as all the reciprocating parts change direction twice each engine revolution. This leads to a practical limit of about 2.3-2.5L for displacement.
A five cylinder engine has 5 crank throws spaced every 72 degrees around the crank. Power delivery is much smoother, and as a result the engine has much less vibration.
Oh and add the Honda accord Hybrid as another 3 cylinder contender.
