Names and claims in a somewhat decadent era creep through proprietary annexation to activities that upgrade the prestige of expropriators. Seventy-five years ago in the United States professions and professional activity referred generally to physicians, lawyers, teachers and those occupations with education wherein some professing of learning could be said to happen. Today that meaning is lost and one is a professional janitor, pro carpet installer, pro painter, telemarketer-politician (reading a computer script), burger-flipper at Burger King, pro athlete or anything else done for pay.
A sport might be said to be, for example, Afghan horseback football with a goat as the ball. Long ago quasi-rugby polo might have been a good training exercise for cavalrymen, while chess was a war game that modeled deployment and movement of pieces. In a decadent era where people live inside urban boxes with television and Internet and do not train as warriors for cavalry charges in the Rocky Mountains or wherever, arguments about the question of chess being a sport or a game arise instead.
Trying to fit new activities into old name categories tends to corrupt the initial meaning of the category. The appearance of new human activity such as automobile racing requires some description and classification so old, existing categories are used. A decision is made that the new activity is this or that.
Automobile racing is a sport.Sport formerly was just a human activity, then machines were invented that allowed machine-augmented sport. Perhaps new names should be made to describe new activities- such as machine-sports or cyborg sports. What about machine-augmented leg-boots that permit humans to run a marathon is twenty minutes? Isn’t that a sport, yet not just a human sport?
And what of computer coding-isn’t it also a sport like chess? Or is that simply a profession in C+?
A sport might be said to be, for example, Afghan horseback football with a goat as the ball. Long ago quasi-rugby polo might have been a good training exercise for cavalrymen, while chess was a war game that modeled deployment and movement of pieces. In a decadent era where people live inside urban boxes with television and Internet and do not train as warriors for cavalry charges in the Rocky Mountains or wherever, arguments about the question of chess being a sport or a game arise instead.
Trying to fit new activities into old name categories tends to corrupt the initial meaning of the category. The appearance of new human activity such as automobile racing requires some description and classification so old, existing categories are used. A decision is made that the new activity is this or that.
Automobile racing is a sport.Sport formerly was just a human activity, then machines were invented that allowed machine-augmented sport. Perhaps new names should be made to describe new activities- such as machine-sports or cyborg sports. What about machine-augmented leg-boots that permit humans to run a marathon is twenty minutes? Isn’t that a sport, yet not just a human sport?
And what of computer coding-isn’t it also a sport like chess? Or is that simply a profession in C+?
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