Nothing To Speak Of

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I was curious about the meaning of ‘nothing’ and so looked it up in a couple of online resources.

The best definition I found was in Wikipedia which says that ‘nothing’ is ‘a concept that describes the absence of anything’. Other dictionaries define it as ‘something that has no existence.’

I’m certainly no philosopher, but don’t the words ‘anything’ or ‘something’ used in these definitions raise yet more questions? For example, if the absence of ‘anything’ is right, then what is the effect of its absence? And if ‘something’ that has no existence is right, then what is the ‘something’ referred to?

Wikipedia confirms my train of thought by the following: ‘Grammatically, the word ‘nothing’ is an indefinite pronoun, which means that it refers to something. One might argue that ‘nothing’ is a concept, and since concepts are things, the concept of ‘nothing’ itself is a thing.’

As I looked closer into the subject of ‘nothingness’, I found that the philosophers have tortured themselves with it since ancient times. The list of them is impressive, starting with Parmenides in the 5th-century BC right up to modern folk such as Newton and Einstein. I have to say though that reading through some of their thoughts on the issue is akin to swimming in thick mud. But then my brain isn’t as good as theirs.

Why am I banging on about the concept of nothingness? It’s simply because I can find nothing of any interest, at least to me, to talk about today.

But I’ll bet you guessed that already!
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A New Definition Needed

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The OED tells us that the term ‘the chattering classes’, first coined by journalist Frank Johnson in 1980, is a derogatory one directed at ‘a politically active, socially concerned and highly educated section of the ‘metropolitan middle class,’ especially those with political, media, and academic connections.

I’m not sure that this definition is true any more. You only have to see the number of emailers, bloggers, texters, Twitters, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other social-networking fanatics chattering and burbling away online to give credence to the need for a new definition to be drawn up for the term.

As I had the misfortune to travel up to London yesterday, I’d add to any new definition, the people who seem always to be chattering away on their mobile phones. There is no escape from them - you see and hear them on the train (even in the ‘Quiet Zone’), on the Tube, walking the streets ... just about everywhere. What marks them out is not the fact that their conversations are usually banal, but that they all seem to be shouting into their phones as if the people on the other end are deaf. They are often also not looking where they are going.

If all that doesn’t demonstrate the need for a redefinition of the term’ the chattering classes’, I don’t know what will!
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