Context is For the Weak
A lazy excuse for an off-week post which at least includes some funny phrases
"Context" is not a safe word that makes all your other horse-shit statements disappear
It’s been a hard week,1 so here’s a lighter-than-usual light one.
There used to be a… I don’t even remember. Blog? Tumblr? Something like that—called “context is for the weak”. An ironic phrase, obviously, but one which I found particularly amusing. And at some point I began to occasionally tweet out quotes that struck me as weird or funny with that as a hash tag.2
So here is a list of 62 quotes I have tweeted in the past decade, from most recent to the earliest. With no context. In some cases I remember where they come from. In others I don’t. But either way, it doesn’t matter: context is for the weak.3
Enjoy.
"Mosses are really bad at fucking. They are the incels of the plant world."
"the luminous, numinous Carl-Sagan-osity of things."
"Twitter is inherently a place for… executing rhinoceroses… That’s what it is designed to be."
"If you wake up one morning and suddenly discover that you don't know any two people with the same first name and that your phone number begins with 555, you can safely assume you've fallen into a work of fiction."
"...Our neo-Kantian ears…"
"You read Nietzsche in freshman philosophy, and for a few weeks you vaguely feel like you ought to be the ubermensch. But that’s hard, and it’s not really clear why it would even be a good thing, so eventually you forget about it."
"Do you want a lawyer?" "No, I ate already."
"Tolkien was not actually big on describing people, particularly people who weren't also trees."
"Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead."
"contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality."
"Let us grant, if only to avoid unnecessary complications, that lima beans are not conscious."
"He offers half a dozen structural reforms to the democratic process, all of them so urgently necessary and obviously fair that only a Republican could fail to support them."
“The first thing to be said about Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev is that his last name is a data-retrieval nightmare.”
"for example, those of the Nazis or Heidegger or Derrida or Rorty."
"Ice cream was for assassins who finished their targets."
"She thought that without noticing that she’d thought it, and she soon forgot it, and only remembered it much later."
"There is still the elephant in the room, which in this case is also a dead bird beneath a window."
"His life is the stuff of which movies—at least French movies—are made."
“... cannibalism, serial murder, sado-masochism or lawyers.”
"…probably the only sixteenth-century poem most ordinary citizens know by heart.."
"Men are the new women." —NPR, this morning4
"Why were the creatures in the Grasshopper's dream playing games instead of the trombone?"
"Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain."
"Recently NASA scientists discovered that most people love to play videogames but hate to die in fiery airplane crashes."
"This is some serious Kremlin stuff, with more pornstache."
"Are you listening, my pretty vermin, are you listening?"
“His digestion is impaired, which is highly respectable.”
"you… need goats blood, a copper bowl, and a prayer to the Thresher God (may we all be devoured in his maw)." —@jbouie5
"He felt rather superior, because HE never thought at all."
"Humanity is measured in mind and soul, not in number of hair follicles."
"At least we can take some comfort in knowing he died as he lived: half-naked at an airport."
"…almost as if one of the most universally revered thinkers of the western philosophical tradition wasn’t a total moron."
"…children in the lanes here say he has sold himself to the devil. I don't know what he can have done with the money."
"…there will also be oh so many who ask “Will the grandeur and beauty of the fathomless universe be on the test?”"
"At a zoo just down the road... keepers fed the cougars ice pops made of blood."
Mead: George Herbert? Margaret? Lawrence? Homebrewed & frothy?6
"…the results resemble a Google Images search vomited onto the page."
"…leaving the reader with a mangled corpse of a book, punctured by broken bones and leaking shit."
"For the snake by the river ate parables."
"The only three females so far sent into space by NASA were two spiders and a monkey."
"...the Saudi Arabia of milk."
"No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference."
"But what about the lurid world of plant sexuality?"
"Dr. Gay Hitler, son of George Washington Hitler, was a local dentist."
"Highwaymen are not respected any more like they used to be."
"This was back in the day when Jesus was a Democrat."
"…boycotts were 'contrary to the free spirit of our institutions.'"
"Boycotts in particular aroused a shocked and angry opposition."
"…within easy smelling distance of the fine houses…"
"...the way of the cross has been a difficult one for homo economicus to travel."
"Alive, big-hearted, courageous, daring, dynamic, forward, liberate, progress, robust, reform, vibrant."
"Down to tautological bedrock."
"Reagan was to money what Hefner was to sex."
"Utopianism morphed into cannibalism, and the movement ate its leaders."
"I sure hope he doesn't go on television to promote the elimination of fucking."
"The Thing most like living one's Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life."
"There may not even be consensus on what those... values ought to be, but they agree that you ought to have some."
"Be good or god will eat you."
"Brooklyn is not expanding!"
“My advice would be for people not to climb into appliances.”
"It wasn't Susan's fault that she was only a corn cob."
"...toying architecturally with the bones."7
Ok, I post these more than a week in advance, so while the week in which I prepared this was a hard week, I don’t know whether or not the week you’re reading this will be. Hopefully not. But I guess we’ll see.
It’s not a common hashtag, but it’s not unused either: others have used it. But I don’t know who began it, and I am fairly sure I recreated rather than borrowed it—not surprising, once the phrase exists (the phrase being an actually worthy creation), it’s an obvious thing to do.
It goes without saying that we should—quietly, without making a fuss—support the weak, right?
Sic. This is one of two cases in which I gave the source of the quote, since the quote was still weird and mysterious enough that that didn’t count as context, and, thus, was something even the non-weak might have.
This is the other case (op. cit. note 4).
This is the only one that is not a quote: it was a thought I had as I read something and saw a reference to “Mead”. Oops, that was the context I guess. But I don’t recall what I was reading, so that’s something anyway. I don’t think it was homebrwed & frothy anyway.
Ok, technically this one I didn’t tweet with the “ContextIsForTheWeak” hashtag; I used “NoContextForYou”, presumably having not encountered the former phrase yet. But clearly in the same spirit, so I am including it.