SUPERLATIVE ABSOLUTES

I get impatience with misuse of language.

I admit I am not a master of English - perhaps simply an admirer from a distance.

But we seem to have lost the idea of what an absolute is.

Everything is "the very best" (which is redundant, isn't it?) - we advertise with "the newest/greatest/cheapest.:

And my personal most irritating use - "never in history...." or "for the first time in history..."

5,000 years may be the longest time we have preserved records of historical events. And most of those from an extremely limited number of uncovered artifacts.

Yes, we may have some writings - some pottery - some drawings on a cave.

And from these we make HUGE leaps of imagination to "well, then obviously EVERY one(meaning the one person or group whose art/writing/craft we have uncovered) from this period of time (documented by an dating technique discovered 1950) were doing / making / exploring /living such-and-such."

Without considering that hey, maybe we DON'T know what everyone else WAS doing. We don't have a record of the people in Australia - we don't know what the Chinese were doing at this same time - heck, we don't know what this dude's next-door-neighbor was doing!

We probably only have the record of a man, since most historians seem to be male, and most records appear to be patriarchal - so at least HALF of the population, the home-making, family-rearing, nurturing and generally peaceful half, is not represented at all.

So we get an account of the ONE person or group whose writings/art/interpretations survived the floods, chaos, fires and war - and make a generalization from THAT?

Okay - let me cease from my panting rage - and calmly and gently suggest that perhaps we do NOT know much of anything.

So we might want to admit this, especially in our use of absolutes.

Now please, allow me to lock myself up in a padded room for a few hours to calm down.