I specifically said I didn't wish to penalise stupidity and that I have nothing against people who are unfortunately unable to do serious stuff with their brains. What could I have done to make this even clearer?
Omitted the phrase 'at any particular moment'? It seemed to me that you were deliberately distinguishing between the temporarily stupid and the permanently stupid.
(a) that's taking a piece of grandiose and imprecise rhetoric rather more literally than its manufacturer intended;
Quite possibly. I know I have a tendency to take things literally when I shouldn't.
Someone from Speakability (http://www.speakability.org.uk/), a charity that helps people with aphasia, came to speak at my church a fortnight ago, and showed us a video that included an interview with a woman with moderate aphasia, who used to have very severe aphasia, and who spoke about how upsetting (and untrue) she found it when people make gradiose and imprecise rhetoric about language being what separates us from the animals, so I resolved to challenge that kind of sentiment whenever I saw it. Sorry if I was too quick to decide your post came into that category.
'at any particular moment' may of course mean that at nearly every particular moment you're unable to do serious stuff with your brain. It's a continuum, innit?
Omitted the phrase 'at any particular moment'? It seemed to me that you were deliberately distinguishing between the temporarily stupid and the permanently stupid.
Ah, I see. In fact that was intended to have precisely the opposite effect: I intended it inclusively, because if I'd just said "people being [...] too stupid to think" I thought it would look as if I only meant the permanently stupid. So I added "at any particular moment" to include the momentarily or temporarily stupid as well, and my maths background must have got the better of me for just long enough to overlook the fact that not everybody would instinctively consider this to be a generalisation which included the case "at every moment".
So, sorry about the misunderstanding, and about my lack of patience in my previous reply.
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Omitted the phrase 'at any particular moment'? It seemed to me that you were deliberately distinguishing between the temporarily stupid and the permanently stupid.
(a) that's taking a piece of grandiose and imprecise rhetoric rather more literally than its manufacturer intended;
Quite possibly. I know I have a tendency to take things literally when I shouldn't.
Someone from Speakability (http://www.speakability.org.uk/), a charity that helps people with aphasia, came to speak at my church a fortnight ago, and showed us a video that included an interview with a woman with moderate aphasia, who used to have very severe aphasia, and who spoke about how upsetting (and untrue) she found it when people make gradiose and imprecise rhetoric about language being what separates us from the animals, so I resolved to challenge that kind of sentiment whenever I saw it. Sorry if I was too quick to decide your post came into that category.
Ah, I see. In fact that was intended to have precisely the opposite effect: I intended it inclusively, because if I'd just said "people being [...] too stupid to think" I thought it would look as if I only meant the permanently stupid. So I added "at any particular moment" to include the momentarily or temporarily stupid as well, and my maths background must have got the better of me for just long enough to overlook the fact that not everybody would instinctively consider this to be a generalisation which included the case "at every moment".
So, sorry about the misunderstanding, and about my lack of patience in my previous reply.