[RascalPuff]

Dear Mr. Mkirkpatrick and whomever else it may concern:

Please consider this particular missive a gesture, by way of introduction.

What is time?
What is motion?
What is space?
What is gravity?
What's the difference between Newton's space and Einstein's space-time? What's the difference between temperature and heat?
What's the difference between absolute space and non absolute space? What's the difference between absolute time and non-absolute time?
And so on.
And so forth.
The What? How? Where? When?, Why? and Who? Are usually fairly easy to sincerely or flippantly ask, and not always so easy to responsibly answer.
Asking usually requires a lot less time and space than answering.
There seems a popular trend of interrogatives of the above general categories; when responded to - the response time and space - of an 'answer' - usually requiring more than the time and space required to ask whatever question.
The (especially internet forumite) interrogators too often lean heavily toward quasi-demanding and impatiently expecting correct answers in about the same amount of time and space occupied by the questions. ('If your answer is more information than I can jot down on my thumbnail then it isn't worth consideration; is a waste of time; cannot redeem itself'; etceteras - there's a shovel full of this forever scattered...). End of communication.

Gridlock. (The social status quo on a lot of diversely - unecessarily and time consuming - 'misunderstood' issues; often involving public endangerment, personal - physical and psychological - security and/or life and death...)

Whereas, speaking in general terms to which there are acknowledged exceptions, however more improved 'simpler is better' may be, often it isn't tenable, with regard to what amount of time, space and information is necessary to fullfill a correct and comprehensive answer to a reasonably submitted question (Consider the duration of Newton's PRINCIPIA <Or Homer's Odyssey>, for example, and a class full of students demanding indignantly that the author 'keep it simple, stupid', for them...)
I think this rudimentary observation is fairly easy for anyone reading it to more or less align themselves with. Often agreements are arrived upon, in one or more fairly few exchanges. But those are not the kinds of communications at issue here. Presently the issue(s) are the rifely raging phenomena regarding the arts of missing the points...
Then there are the unnecessary attachments that not infrequently accompany the ping & pong (Cheech & Chong) of ('Who's on 1st?') questions and answers ('I don't know is playing 2nd base?'.). Some are cordial ('Today is playing the outfield'), some are testy, some provocative, and some are just plain impertinent departures from the written and unwritten (Tomorrow is pitching) rules of simple respect ('Yesterday is at bat'.) for others, regarding debate and argument ('I don't give a damn is playing shortstop').
Enter the ad hominem disagreement - 'Your shoelaces are untied'. 'Why do you part your hair in the middle or on this or that side?', 'When is the last time you took a bath?' - shifting from the formerly agreed objective in whatever discussion about whatever subject, to issues not relevant to the initially - written or unwritten - objective of sincere communication. Transmitting and receiving with equal responsiblity.

Yes. This is rudimentary stuff here and that's what the record is presently underscoring: willfull (artfully well honed and tactically practiced) departure, diversion, delay and displacement of original subjects at issue are commonplace.
Another example from a bushel of popularly practiced samples is the pretension that what is clarified by the answerer and understood by the questioner is not understood by the questioner.
('What?', 'I can't/didn't hear or understand you'; on occasions where the questioner does hear and understand the answerer: or conversely - when the answerer falsely purports not to understand whatever question.)

This occurs on one or both sides of a given dialogue when neither or both or however many other participating persons are deliberately avoiding any resolution, which, of course, is the (prerequisitely established) written or unwritten objective of Q. & A.

If the answer fullfills the question, the questioner may feel 'inferior', 'outdone', 'embarassed', 'offended', etceteras, and consequently engage and perpetuate indefinitely a departure not only from understanding the answer, but, punitively 'retaliating' against the source of the provided answer in any number of innovative ways. The same principle may apply to the asked person (the format designated source of answer) feigning a misunderstanding or non-reception of the asked question. And so it often goes. Squared...

Truly yours authored an essay entitled, THE ART OF MISSING THE POINT: When You Can't Afford To Catch On, due to the above described, altogether too familiar form of communications gridlock - the deliberate, often highly skilled and versatile practice of sabotaging what might otherwise be symbiotically beneficial, reciprocal communication - on the transmitting and/or receiving side of whatever interaction.
To this record's way of thinking, one of the more progressive modes of proving authority and gracefully allowing others to recognise it, is to tell them what they already knew, but had not previously heard or read - a vocabulary for. Then, they aren't obliged to 'take your word for it'. Then, it isn't altogether 'new'.


It is a fact that the general human response to anything new is an aversion from - if not a hostility toward it (whatever, not counting the magnetism of the word 'new<!>', regarding marketing saleable items, in which case the word 'New', draws people to - rather than averts them from - it. Whatever is being sold, traded, bargained or brokered).

Having said that and moving right along.

The internet is a fairly direct parody of the social world, with or without any example or record of what happens - how people relate to one another; including elaborate, aversive, diversive, retreat or attack methods of (millinnea aged, recently *vocabularized), responsibly or irresponsibly, morally or immorally practiced *'verbal judo', et al, on - and, with a much more extended and practiced history, off - the internet.
(Open the - or your - doors to the world, and, be not surprised when it individually and collectively walks, crawls, limps, runs, drives, flies or stampedes in'. - TRP <That Rascal Puff>)
Reconsidering the consequently inspired title: THE ART OF MISSING THE POINT: When You (Don't think you can, or) Can't Afford To Catch On.
Sorta like A MOVEABLE VIETNAM: A Continental Misunderstanding. (More about that, later.)

But you and I, sir, we've been through that, and hopefully that is not our fate. So let us not fail to communicate now, the hour is getting late... (paraphrased).

To be continued.

Best regards, K. B. Robertson