This is really random, mundane, and pointless, but I was just writing an English paper when I suddenly thought about how the age-old chicken vs. the egg debate is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. If you don’t know why, you should probably hit the science books pretty hard this weekend. But it did get me to wondering, what IS the dumbest argument/debate/discussion ever? I thought I would pose the question to you guys, for two reasons:
You have to appreciate the irony
It beats doing my English paper
So, any ideas?
The IQ of a group is equal to the IQ of the dumbest member divided by the number of people in the group.
I don’t know about the Great Debates, but the dumbest argument I’ve ever been in personally was with my ex-girlfriend over the relative merits of Ginger and Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island. The exchange got rather heated. We later realized how incredibly stupid that was and we laughed about that for the remaining three years of our relationship.
We almost had a similar argument about Betty and Veronica of Archie comics…but saw the absurdity of that in time to just laugh at ourselves before it got very far.
Once, I got into a rant to two friends about how I hate ambiguous words, that is, words that have more than one definition, where the listener is never going to know which one is being used. I was asked for an example. I said, how about biannual?
One of my friends said, “Biannual isn’t ambiguous. It means twice a year and everyone knows that!”
The other said, “No no no. Biannual means once every two years. Everybody knows that.”
I said, “Here’s the exact problem. We could use words like biennial or semi-annual, which are non-ambiguous, but reasonable people differ about what biannual means. Sure, it meant one specific thing originally, but now it has become ambiguous through misuse.”
“It’s not ambiguous, it means once every two years.”
"No, twice a year.
This went on for way too long until I gave up. I kind of would have preferred to referee a duel to the death between the two of them, though.
Nothing I write about any person or group should be applied to a larger group.
I went to a summer-long program for the arts this summer, and since we were sequestered on a college campus the entire time, people really got on each other’s nerves and these two close friends got in a week long argument over whether contradiction could be used as a symnonym for oxy moron.
Got into a screaming match one time with a friend of mine who insisted that Seattle couldn’t be in the Pacific Northwest 'cause it was on the East Coast of the Pacific.
