Remembering Mere Keep
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Back
during the 1980s, I established Mere Keep. The name came right out
of a dictionary. In the distant past, a mere had been a boundary
or a border. A keep had been a sanctuary for the protection of precious
things. Thus, Mere Keep was a sanctuary for the protection of precious
boundaries. The boundaries that I'd intended to protect at Mere Keep
were the boundaries between ideas. I'd had in mind the boundaries
between such ideas as freedom and slavery, rights and privileges, sin and
crime, God and religion, diversity and complexity, law and legislation,
and anarchy and chaos. Such boundaries exist only as the understanding
of the differences between the ideas that they separate. They're
expressed by the differences in the meanings of the words that represent
the ideas. The disappearance of such a boundary represents the loss
of understanding of the things that ought to be separated by the boundary
but that are no longer recognized as being different from one another.
Such a loss of understanding is revealed by confusion in the use of the
words that ought to express the differences between the ideas. Mere
Keep was intended as a place for the discovery, exploration, and protection
of such boundaries.
In
October of 1996, the gestapo thugs forced me to leave Mere Keep forever.
However, I didn't abandon the objective that Mere Keep had represented.
To this day, I continue to be an advocate for the distinctions between
the meanings of words, and for the understanding that's expressed by those
distinctions.1
Anarchy
is order achieved without coercion. Chaos is lack of order.
May
denotes permission. Might denotes likelihood or probability.
"Mother,
may
I go play with Sally?"
"Yes
Johnny, but be careful. She might get pregnant."
It's
so easy that a cave man could do it. Nevertheless, I frequently see
advertisements for some product or another that should be avoided by "women
who may be pregnant". The statement that a woman may
be pregnant, if it made any sense at all, would represent permission for
her to be that way. The phrase "you
may get pregnant"
makes more sense than the phrase "you may be pregnant".
The correct phrase for use in the advertisement is that the products ought
to be avoided by "women who might be pregnant", indicating a likelihood,
not by "women who may be pregnant", indicating permission.
When
I was young, I ate butter or margarine. One day, some people decided
to sell a product for which they didn't have a name. Since it lacked
a name, they decided to call it by how it's applied. However, spread
isn't something that you eat on toast. The stuff isn't spread.
It's yellow stuff. Spread is how you apply it.
Concrete
is a construction material made of sand, gravel, and cement. You
don't make driveways and sidewalks out of cement. You make them out
of concrete. Cement is part of the concrete.
Blocks
are made with concrete. Bricks are made with clay.
A
home is where somebody lives. A house is a structure. Real
estate people don't sell homes. They sell houses. The people
who live in the houses make homes of them.
A
star shines. A light bulb shines. You don't shine your shoes.
You polish them. When you polish them, they don't shine. They
reflect.
A
child is a minor who hasn't achieved puberty. An adolescent is a
minor who has achieved puberty. Pedophilia doesn't have anything
to do with adolescents, but with chil-
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August 2009 |
Frontiersman, c/o
4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507 |
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