Language has a lot of vagueness.
But most of the time, when something is vague, we can figure stuff out from the context.
Occasionally, though, it’s kind of funny.
Once I was talking to this elderly Japanese woman.
She was telling me about the upcoming (at the time) prime minister election.
And since it was a pretty significant event, her face took on the facial expressions one does when talking about a significant upcoming event.
Only she sort of “mispronounced” the word election.
She got the look of “something is coming,” and said:
“This weekend there will be a prime minister erection.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. She asked why and I explained.
She thought it was pretty funny as well.
The picture of some old prime minister sitting there with all the press, hoping to get a boner.
Then when Prime Minister Jr. stands up, everybody politely claps.
“Prime Minister Erection Successful!”
You’ll see this technique used in comedy all the time.
But humor is not the ONLY way to leverage vagueness.
You can use it to “burn up” brain processor time.
For example, if I said, “Yesterday I went to the park and there were a lot of tall trees and flowers.”
What EXACTLY does this mean?
Tall trees and tall flowers?
Or tall trees and normally sized flowers?
Both make sense grammatically.
But what if I said:
“Yesterday I went to the park and there were some tall trees and flowers, but not all of the flowers were as tall as they used to be.”
This is like taking a selfie with your back to a mirror.
Your attention wants to keep swirling around those words to find out what the heck it really means.
And while your friend’s brain is doing that, you can KEEP slamming them with equally confusing sentences.
And one of the interesting things about confusing brains is they tend to look for ANYTHING to that makes sense.
A command, for example, in a sea of verbal confusion, is something the brain will grab hold of for dear life.
What command?
Whatever you want!
A few well-placed sentences, with secret commands side, can keep everybody’s brains spinning around for hours.
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