So what’s up with the latest buzz-word “emerging”? It’s starting to get annoying: First up today, I read a post about Samsung’s kid/teenager-”friendly” phone, which allowed such features as “fake call” and “SOS Call”. And how did they describe the usage of these features? “..users can be directly linked to their family members and friends in emergent situations and even easily escape from dangerous situations”. Ok, sure this is “emergent” as in “emergency”, as in “911″. I’m ok with that.

Exhibit “B” came down the pipes right after I read about the phone: Ray Kurzweil’s interview regarding AI and all the other fund machine-futurism ideas I tend to enjoy. He (of course) decided to use “emerging” in a more philosophical sense: “if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property.” Really Ray? Emerging? Just like the number ‘2′ emerges from putting 1 and 1 together? Whoa, that’s mysterious.. I don’t know how ‘2′ just emerged!

And of course there’s always the “emergent”/”emerging” church issues. How inane is it to have dividing lines along the last few letters of a word?

Seriously, if ‘emergent’ is becoming a synonym for ‘immediate’, ‘unknown’, ‘novel’ or ‘indirect causation’, all terms lose their meaning. It’s like describing the very-well-known processes of electrical transistors not a ’switches’ but as ‘dice’. There are better terms out there: supervenience, direct & indirect causation, necessary or essential, contingent or ‘accidental’..

The language of emerging (whether good or bad) puts stress on the object created and less on it’s contingencies. Read: Giving something the property of necessity-of-existence when it is wholly contingent. While I understand this to be an absolute reversal of Modernism’s interest in the necessary and non-contingent (and subsequent disinterest in all things contingent), surely there ought be a balance to this “OMG! Isn’t this SO GREAT?!” romanticism (or so claims this semi-modernist!)

So as for this blog-post ‘emerging’ from my brain, being contingent on my job not interrupting me, my own ability to focus, as well as my own thoughts being formed into this ‘whole’ which is a post, I guess it “emerges” just like an “emergent” (911) situation.. but honestly, what in life doesn’t emerge??

A few weeks back, I was in the middle of a debate whether “superlative” meant “-est” only or both “-er” and -”est.”

Well, it seems that dictionary.com is no help on this point. It’s entry on ’superlative‘ gives no comment on the “-er” ending.. but while attempting to come up with a term for the ‘middle-ground’, I’ve stumbled upon a few new words of my own making: if SUPER-lative is the highest, then the lower would be the Inferlative? Is that seriously a word? Or what about it’s cousin, ‘Infralative’? I mean, I wanna know; it could be fun to call someone the “inferlative of society” or what have you

In my curiosity, it looks like Latin is the source and solution to my question: there’s other fun words like supRAlative (motion unto above), deinfralative (motion from below), apudessive (at rest beside) and pertingent (at rest on).

So there ya go. I’ll leave you to your own devices for the use of such grammar.

Which is the “proper” syntax:

1. Now, obviously, Johnny may still not throw it to you, but it was an attempt.
2. Now, obviously Johnny may still not throw it to you, but it was an attempt.
3. Obviously Johnny may still not throw it to you, but it was an attempt.

Likely #3. but why do we all tend towards #1? Likely because we early-21st-century-ers are more about communicating how *I* speak (subjective, personal idiosyncrasies) than aligning with the Objective Grammar. Post-Modernism is all about the Death of the Object and Rise of the Subject.

“*I* would have said the sentence with pauses, so THAT is why *I* put commas in.”

Again, which is more important? Communicating clearly (per the norm of Modernistic Rules) or communicating SELF? Do we all display our psychological dependencies of personal acceptance through simple grammar?