What comes first the chicken or the egg?
I honestly never understood that question.
First of all which chicken are we talking about? The mom or the baby?
How could the baby chicken come before the egg that houses it?
It really makes no sense, and yet it's become cliche so it's repeated and by association to the moral of the parable it just kind of has taken on a meaning.
Speaking of the above mentioned cliche, I've been wondering about words and their meanings.
Through our constant use of words they sort of clothe their meaning in a way that makes them indistinguishable from the terms they represent.
So when a world sounds like what it is is it because of it's constant association or would it sound like it's meaning even before we make the connection through repetition?
In other words..what came first? the chicken? or the egg?
While it seems that in the majority of the cases words seem to take on the meaning of the words they represent, take the word egg, who can say the word egg without instantly seeing that distinct white oval shape?
But I've discovered that there are quite a few words that really do not sound like their meaning, no matter how often they're spoken.
One such word is Philanderer. Sounds so distinguished.
And Beverage sounds like something that should be proudly displayed not swigged down in a paper cup.
How about Hammock? Doesn't that sound like a tool with something sharp protruding from it?
Wouldn't it sound better if I said "here pass the old rusty hammock so that I could put up the soft linen beverage and rest in the sun with my friend the distinguished philanderer"?
And how could one word mean an era of time, an emphatic end and a bloody discharge all at once?
Then there are animals.
Lion..ah when one says Liiiion one can sense the regal presence and hear the distant roar. Same with Tiger.
But Bear..doesn't quite do it for me.
And then there's the word giraffe which actually has 2 giraffes walking right through it's name.
But most ironic of all is the word onomatopoeia itself which sound more like it should mean the study of ostrich's retinas then words that sound like their meaning.
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