Paromologia

Paromologia (par-o-mo-lo’-gi-a): Conceding an argument, either jestingly and contemptuously, or to prove a more important point. A synonym for concessio.

“Ok. Ok. You’re right. Unlike me, you’re so astute you know what “astute” means. Your deductive reasoning is a descent into hell, but it is a logically consistent, correct, and properly rational hell.” This is what I said as I walked out the door, sick of being demeaned on a daily basis by my Philosophy Professor wife who had ground me down to a grain of sand during the course of our five-year marriage. The deeper she got into tenure, the more rude she became—affecting a barely discernible British accent when she demolished my latest opinion. I wanted out.

I was an Uber driver when we met. I had never gone to college, but I did graduate from high school somewhere near the bottom. I had stayed back a couple of times before I graduated. My father kept urging me to drop out so I would get a job and move out so he could rent out my room and “clean up on rental income.” So, I graduated.

After trying out a few jobs over the course of a year, I settled on Uber driver. In the interim, the worst job I had was washing pots and pans at “Romeos” Italian restaurant. They specialized in cheese-intensive dishes. The pots pans were hell to clean—I had to use a putty knife and garnet sandpaper to get the mozzarella and pecorino Romano to go away, with pots and pans submersed in 200-degree water, and me, wearing laboratory-grade rubber gloves and a pair of Speedo goggles.

Being an Uber driver was beyond wonderful in comparison to the pots and pans gig.

It was raining like holy hell. I got the message that there was a fare waiting for me in front of the University library. There she was standing under one of those big golf umbrellas, clutching her briefcase. She looked beautiful to me. She got in my cab. I knew where she was going—The Plastered Bastard Bar. It had a wild reputation. According to “Singles Magazine,” it was the number one hookup bar in the entire state. You were supposed to be able to say “Do you want to get laid?” to anybody without fear of making them angry. I was thinking of asking her, but it was strictly against Uber policy. She asked me: “Did you ever hear of Shrodinger’s cat?” Of course I had never heard of Schrödinger’s cat. I said, “No. Is it missing?” She laughed with the gravelly laugh that I came to hate, and said, “Sort of. He’s in a box and you do not know whether he is alive or dead. In fact, he could be alive and dead. As I’ve memorized it from the internet:”

“In Schrodinger’s imaginary experiment, you place a cat in a box with a tiny bit of radioactive substance. When the radioactive substance decays, it triggers a Geiger counter which causes a poison or explosion to be released that kills the cat. Now, the decay of the radioactive substance is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This means that the atom starts in a combined state of ‘going to decay’ and ‘not going to decay’. If we apply the observer-driven idea to this case, there is no conscious observer present (everything is in a sealed box), so the whole system stays as a combination of the two possibilities. The cat ends up both dead and alive at the same time. Because the existence of a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time is absurd and does not happen in the real world, this thought experiment shows that wavefunction collapses are not just driven by conscious observers.” (https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2013/07/30/what-did-schrodingers-cat-experiment-prove/)

“Holy crap,” I thought as I kept driving, “How in the hell did she memorize that. A dead cat? Jeez, she’s crazy.” She said, “I’m a Philosophy Professor. Do you want to get laid?” That did it. We went to her place. A small apartment near campus. There were large portrait pictures of men all over the walls. The weirdest was this guy with a giant mustache. “That’s Nietzsche” she told me “A Continental philosopher.” I had no idea what she was talking about, and didn’t care. I just wanted to get laid—and I did! She told me “as a thought experiment” she wanted to marry me. I was completely stunned, but not enough to say no. We got married in the Philosophy section of the University’s library. We spent our one-week honeymoon camping (with permission) in Ricard Rorty’s former parking space at the University of Virginia. Then, we went back to California.

She started making fun of me because I couldn’t spell epistemology. She laughed at me and called me a Neanderthal because I didn’t know what “the allegory of the cave” is. Eventually, I learned how to spell “epistemology” but she said it was “too late.” I knew the end was in sight when she bashed me in the head with the hard cover edition of Gadamer’s “Truth and Method.” It gave me a concussion. She said she was trying to prove an “ontological” point. While I was in the hospital, I called a divorce lawyer and got the ball rolling.

The grounds of divorce would be “Epistemic Incompatibility.” My lawyer, who had an undergraduate degree in philosophy, said: “Don’t worry. She’s originally from Crete, and we know they’re all liars.”

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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