When you erase a word with a pencil, where does it go?
Asked by
Tbag (
3549
)
August 19th, 2011
Once erased, where do the words go? Haha, I really wonder about this!
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
58 Answers
Even though I’m the first to answer this I’m sending it to Auggie as possible question of the day. Wow, that’s great.
Lol…...The lead is rubbed off and absorbed into the bits and pieces of rubber (eraser)?
Yeah, but you create a word and a concept. Metaphysically where does it go when it’s erased?
Literally? The word is broken up into little bits wrapped in a cocoon of rubber that get swept off of the writing surface and onto the floor.
Figuratively, it goes out like a person experiencing an amicable divorce. It may not be in the current picture (or story) and gets replaced by another partner (or word), but it isn’t forgotten.
@Blackberry This one just struck me just right. Words have power, so where did it go?
It met the missing socks—you know those socks—and they’re sipping MaiTais on the beach.
@Adirondackwannabe Maybe it’s too early for me lol.
The power comes from our brain. We’ve mastered written and spoken language, and we project it out to others to communicate with each other. Assuming no one has read the written (and now erased) word, I guess it went back into the brain until it’s time to be communicated to someone else another time?
@Adirondackwannabe So what you’re really saying is, if I want homophobia to be gone, I best get some giant erasers and find every instance of the word “faggot” being written?
Just as the fossilized remains of our primordial ancestors are trampled underfoot daily by their more highly evolved offspring, so the faint traces of that first, tentative word lie obscured under its better suited descendant. In a sense, it contributed some of its cognitive DNA to the formation of that more perfect expression, and so lives on in it.
You have released it into the ether.
@Aethelflaed Different words have different power. Negative words don’t have the same metaphysical power as positive words.
Nowhere, it’s simply lead away. These are the jokes folks!
@Adirondackwannabe There’s no such thing as negative words, only letters combos that we societally assign power to. And, why do negative words have a different metaphysical power as positive words?
Tell me where it came from and I will tell you where it has gone.
@Aethelflaed Negative words don’t have the same power as positive words because of how I view the world. Hope, charity, and peace, and faggot, homo, and hate convey completely different power.
You can find them under the orange tree, ready for anyone to pick up and use on Fluther.
Word Heaven.
Bad words go to Word Hell.
Their spirits fly out and attach themselves to other writing instruments.
Then, when you are writing, they force themselves out. That is why sometimes when you mean to write “pony” you write “banana”.
Of course, they are then erased again, and the circle of life continues.
Their heaven is some of the SpellCheck programs.
Where had the word come from in the first place? That’s where it goes.
The Great Dictionary in the Sky!
The same place bubbles go when they ~pop!~
I would simply write it again with a rubber.
A pencil can’t erase. The rubber does it. Or are you referring to just “colouring” above the word?
It goes to the lost word orphanage and dreams of the day it will be adopted again.
I don’t know, but every time you do it, I forget another word. So could you _____ stop?
To Gailcalled. She collects them. :)
@Jude Aww, that is such a great mental image… little words pinned to display boards and hung on the walls.
Words that have been rubbed out sleep with the fishes.
And what if my pencils don’t have the eraser attached to them? What if they are old school? Aren’t they called pencils?
Is the word on the paper or in the mind? You can erase the word on the paper. The word in your mind will be gone by the time you’re 45.
.
Overstated for effect. Sorry. Not all words will fade by the time you’re 45. Just the ones you’re groping for.
my love for this Q keeps growing. I second making it QOD
Hahah funny answers guys! Makes you wana scroll down and see the next answer :D
@rebbel hahah, my head is trying to fill in the blanks.
That reminds me of this book I read, The Book of the Mad by Tanith Lee. Some crazy poet dude in an asylum wrote poems, and then ate the paper before anybody could see it. By destroying his works, he believed that they lived on forever, although I really forget what explanation he gave for that. Something about how nobody reading his stuff making it eternal, since nobody could read and interpret them to something that wasn’t what he intended, and so they always remained as intended, in his head. I guess like Rainman, but Goth. I denno. That came out of nowhere.
Oh damn.
Also reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip, where Calvin wonders about when you put bread in the toaster, and toast comes out, where did the bread go?
As far as the question goes…well, they disappear through very logical means, and go into the state of ’‘have never been’’, besides that they were once writ, and now only exist as a memory of being writ.
@Hibernate The fact that not all pencils have erasers is irrelevant. The question is clearly talking about a pencil with an eraser. Moreover, the statement “a pencil cannot erase” is false—even if some pencils lack erasers—due to the existence of pencils that can erase.
@ratboy, you Wordled Symbeline! Cool!
@Jeruba, who’s the rat? Thanks to your snitching, I’ll be booted for plagiarism.
Response moderated
Oh crap haha…my browser doesn’t seem to accept the Wordle link, so whatever you guys see, I don’t get, instead it’s some error thing. That was confusing, I apologize for freaking out.
To answer a poetic question in a pedestrian way, things are defined by arrangements of components. If components are sent off elsewhere then the arrangement no longer exists. It is like what happens to snowmen when they melt.
@LostInParadise, I don’t actually see that answer as either pedestrian or simple. It happens to be a question I’ve pondered. If I accept that things are defined by arrangements of components, which seems like a good enough starting point, how do we know when the arrangement no longer exists?
If we cut down a tree, exactly when does it stop being a tree?
What about if I break a bowl? Is it a bowl while it’s broken? What if I mend it? Does it go back to being a bowl after not being a bowl?
How do you define a chair? Is a three-legged chair still a chair?
How do you define a dog? Is a three-legged dog still a dog?
How about me? What am I when I’m dead? Am I the same as the chair? the broken bowl? the felled tree? Is the piece of paper still the tree? Am I a piece of paper? If not, why not?
The link you provided works, but only in small plan. I can’t make out anything, only a few of the bigger words. If I click on it to enlarge, I get that same error message from last time. The hell plug in am I missing here…but, sorry again for my dumbass reaction.
-Edit Ah nevermind, Ratboy sent me a different link where it worked. ^^
What is a house?
It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences.
A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird’s nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs’ houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos—or a shell is a house to a hermit crab—or was to the mollusk that made it—or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the sea-shore are seen to be continuous.
So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn’t anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astronomic motions.
From The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort
@flutherother , Check my link for Wittgenstein’s concept of language game. In brief, he says that words are things that we make up for communication purposes. Houses do not have any built-in houseness and dogs do not have any built-in dogness. Words serve as a convenience.
This reminds me of the old philosophical question about the boat that is over time completely rebuilt as the parts wear out. Is it the same boat? For all practical purposes, it is the same boat.
@LostInParadise Not only is it the same boat for all practical purposes, it is the same boat according to a very common notion of identity. The source of the Ship of Theseus problem is, I think, that sameness is an equivocal concept that we often treat as if it were univocal.
The different senses can be brought out by asking the question “can two things be the same?” Under some interpretations of the question, the answer is yes; under other interpretations of the question, the answer is no. The different interpretations depend on our reading of “same,” and so sameness is equivocal.
@Symbeline, Wordle is a Java App.; you must have Java installed on your computer and have Java apps enabled in your browser.
How late to discover this very Zen question.
and what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Answer this question 
