A Message

I want to take a vow of silence… but, I’d also like to be able to brag about it to others. Piety is useless unless you can lord it over those spiritually weaker than you. Certainly, you are no longer being humble… but, there are other qualities that you can concentrate on. Compassion is a good one. As far as I can tell, compassion is the act of looking as if you care about someone’s distress… or maybe that is empathy. Either way, after doing it in front of a mirror for a few weeks, I can nail it. Inner resolve is another trait that makes you spiritually superior. I used a lot of that to force myself to practice the “compassion look” for a fortnight.

I’m taking a vow of silence so… hush! Or, should I say, “Shh”? Not only does “Shh” not waste any vowels, it is also bilingual. It is exactly how you’d tell a Spanish speaker to shut up. The French say, “Chut” because they really cannot leave well enough alone. Japan uses, “Aa” to hush people. I can’t imagine that working very well at all but it does use the vowels that “shh” doesn’t, so there is a kind of a balance. Millennials don’t use “shh”, preferring the harsher “stfu”. I really think we need to start to standardize this because I often want foreigners to be quiet and they respond violently when I throw my shoe at them…

You can’t get a large mass of people to chut just by telling them to. To get a crowd to stop making noise, you have to either shock them or impress them mightily. A good example would be the 1928 performance of strongman Merman the Incredible in front of a San Diego crowd of ten thousand. Merman confused easily so, when he lifted a phone book over his head and then tore a mule in half, the audience was silent for at least thirty seconds. They might’ve rushed the stage afterwards, but there were pieces of mule all over it.