Only Posting Because I Kinda Promised I Would

I'm still tired and uninspired. I'll try to do better tomorrow.

My critical thinking instructor had the class divulge examples of fallacies from the papers that were due tonight.

"Do you want the funny one or the rant?" I asked.

The instructor said something about saving the funny one for later, but left the choice to me.

"I'll give you the rant," I said.

I explained at some length about a certain publisher's belief that his company's books need little or no editing to be high in quality. In the paper, I related this belief to about four different fallacies, but I didn't go that far in my oral presentation. Still, it seemed to go over well.

Much as I'm tempted to do so, I won't post any more of the S's Follies portion of the paper here. It's too specific to be appropriate for this public a forum.

I will tell you about the funny fallacy example, though, since I didn't get to talk about it in class. Citing snopes.com, the paper recounts a 1986 incident in which Silo offered to sell stereos for "299 bananas."  Thirty-two customers committed the fallacy of equivocation (using two or more definitions of a key word in the same argument) by deliberately misunderstanding the word "bananas."  They each demanded stereos in exchange for $40 to $60 worth of actual bananas. Silo's district manager let the customers exchange the fruit for the stereos. It was pretty much as case of "everybody wins": the customers got cheap stereos, the local zoo and food bank got lots of donated fruit, and Silo got some publicity, probably more than enough to offset the money lost on the transactions.

Hey, is Silo completely out of business everywhere, or did it merely dump some of its stores?

Yawn. G'night.  May all your bananas come true.

Karen