“Never seen anything like it” is rapidly climbing my list of top most annoying phrases. Why is your set of “things I’ve seen” worth anything? Without qualification of scope and earned experience, “things I’ve seen” sets are like assholes. Everyone’s got one.
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Phrases to consider: “Nobody in the village/city/state/country/world has seen anything like this”... “Not in living memory” “Not in the history of this village....country” “Not in human history” “Not in the history of life on this planet” “Not in 13.2B years”
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Only time the phrase is merited is when you’re the world’s most experienced in an area of human experience that’s younger than living memory. Like astronauts and space imaging experts can say that about photos taken from space. That’s a meaningful statement.
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The pandemic sparks this a lot. From people who haven’t yet bothered to even look up Wikipedia about the Spanish flu or Black Death, let alone try to read books or talk to historians. Particularly annoying since closest reference event is just past living memory (102 y).
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Yes people HAVE seen things like this before. They just happen to be almost all dead. Your friendly neighborhood know-it-all is not the limit of collective memory.
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Egotism is overindexing on your own experiences and imagining them to be exceptional by default. Lake Wobegon effect on steroids. A: “What’s the world’s highest waterfall?” B: “I think it’s in South Amer...” C (interrupting): “I once took a piss off the Motel 8 roof”
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There’s a version of this parochial scholars are prone to, which amounts to “if nobody’s ever talked about it in my narrow field, it’s new to the world” “Never seen anything like these forest fires in medieval military history” effectively. Different species of egotism.
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Aside, Cthulhucene is a Donna Haraway term https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/ …
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End of conversation
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reminds me of douglas adams suggesting to round down and say the universe is empty
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This is the same thing as "biggest ever". No. Biggest yet. People tend to think that the world is the sum total of what they know (which I realize is exactly your point).
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