Can you tell the difference between a bunny being *deliberate* and a suggestive cloud pattern? Between a compliment and an ego-stroke? Between predictive guessing text and complete thoughts that answer actually asked questions?

~Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (2008), II.16 (65)

humanity's suffering from humanity, from oneself: this is a result of a violent separation from one's animal past..., a declaration of war against the old instincts, which previously constituted the basis of one's strength, pleasure, and fearfulness.

--this fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner became the inventor of "bad conscience." But with this one was introduced the greatest and most sinister sickness which still afflicts humanity even today:

this animal which is to be "tamed," which rubs oneself raw on the bars of one's cage, this deprived human consumed with homesickness for the desert, who has no choice but to transform oneself into an adventure, a place of torture, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness

All they do is refer back to the missing parts of the context. Consequently, constancy of meaning is never anything but the constancy of contexts. ~Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 89

The belief that words possess a meaning that would be proper to them is a leftover from sorcery, the residue of ‘the magical theory of names.’ Words are not at all the names of ideas present to the mind; they are not constituted by any fixed association with data, whatever that data might be.

talking exactly like flat earthers literally believe just saying something (“sunset”) makes it so (Earth spins!).

but we know that biology, chemistry, and genetics are far more variable. (Even the horrifyingly ignorant Iowa law rescinding civil rights protections for trans folks literally says parents can take up to 6 months to *decide* the sex of their intersexed born infant.)