Some thoughts on thought terminating cliche's

Before we start, at the end of the article it says, "The statement "That is a thought-terminating cliché" can in and of itself function as a thought-terminating cliché. Once the stator has identified a first statement as a thought-terminating cliché, they may feel absolved of needing to determine whether that first statement is indeed a thought-terminating cliché or whether it has actual merit."

(So it's like a Russell's Paradox: the set-denoter is a set unto itself (or something???))

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So a thought terminating cliche, which I posted just before this, is a word or phrase which ends the thought process; like, "The end."

The evil part of this is that we don't know that it's being done. It seems out of our control.

I don't remember when I learned to go on the Wikipedia page, but I do remember my friend Liz saying, "Whatever," in a comical way. She kept saying it at various times, most of the time absurdly so as to provoke humor.

"Whatever" as it is used to quell the thought process, is a thought-terminating cliche. There's others out there and I challenge you to find them.

Thought terminating cliche's are bad when we don't want to stop the thought process, or when we don't know that our thoughts are being stopped and we don't really realize it; such as in the case of George Orwell's 1984. (see previous post).

Okay, so when are thought terminating cliche's good?

Well, when the thought process should be stopped. Maybe an ethically illustrative example would be the obsessive compulsive thinker who keeps thinking, "I have to do the dishes, I have to do the dishes;" or worse, a suicidal person.

Cue in the thought terminating cliche, "You think too much."

I wrote earlier on this blog that some people who tell me this are completely wrong. This is because I cherish thinking so much.

I reform my opinion as such in the light of new thought: some thoughts are not as good as others. The stream is obviously harmful when it kills us (as in suicide).


The last relevant point is that there are no thought-pivoting cliche's per se: they would be simply distractors; or maybe the way that stream of consciousness flows and pivots anyway doesn't seem so morally dubious. There are no stream of conscious guiders, either, or thought beginning cliches per se.

I think this fact alludes to the moral dubiousness of thought-terminating cliches.

Get a load of garden path sentences while you are at it. These are probably the closest to thought-pivoting cliches that I could think of.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence