damn you, ryle!

Do you know what it feels like to come up with an idea no human being has ever had before?
Nope, neither do i.
But for a week or two in 1995, i thought that maybe i had. I was working on a master's degree in philosophy, at West Chester U. of PA. In my three semesters i became the department's only graduate assistant, and resurrected the long-dormant philosophy club (my one presidency...wheeee). I graduated something cum laude. It was a very cool year and a half.
In one of my courses, we were studying Gilbert Ryle's "systematically misleading expressions". The ten-cent explanation: certain phrases are inherently dishonest because their construction implies the existence of something which doesn't exist. For example, saying "carnivorous cows don't exist" implies that they do exist, as something must exist to have attributes. The way to correct that phrase would be to say "there is no such thing which is both carnivorous and a cow". This is all a bit egg-headed, but stick with me.
People use systematically misleading expressions all the time, often with no problem, as most people don't need a philosopher to tell them that carnivorous cows don't exist. But we shape our thoughts in words, and if there are lies hidden within our language that we are blind to, the quality of our thought will suffer.
For a week or two, i thought i had come up with a systematically misleading expression no one had ever thought of. A very important one too, one which we all use every day, not realizing that it prevents us from relating to our own human nature more truthfully. Think about the following phrases: "my hands are sticky", "my head hurts", and "my sense of humor is dry" (or a parallel construction such as "her butt is bangin'"). We've all used this grammatical construction, probably every day of our lives. And there is a huge lie hiding inside it.
Anybody spot it?
No, "she ain't got no bangin' butt!" is not the correct response.
The lie is that the construction implies ownership. "My" head. "My" sense of humor. "Her" butt. Is it not strange that our language implies we have the same relationship with our feet as we do with our shoes? We don't "own" a head or a sense of humor. We are a head, we are fingers, we are a sense of humor (despite occasional evidence to the contrary). "Owning" our head invokes a self which is different from our physical, thinking being. Of course, those who believe people are immortal might be thrilled with this. Since the fear of death is the most basic human fear, our primary existential condition, it's easy to perceive why we may have shaped our language this way. Without realizing it, we've all been walking around every day of our lives affirming that we ain't gonna die, even though every measurable piece of evidence screams that we will.
So how do we re-construct this part of our language? Well, clumsily. It will take a while for more honest language to not feel silly. "My head hurts" might become "rob-head hurts". I know, pretty weird. "Her butt is bangin'" becomes "Jenny-butt is bangin'!" Hmm, that last one feels less clumsy, somehow.
Anyway, after a week or two, i read Ryle's next article. And damn double-damn him, he based his next article on my idea. I knew it wasn't going to turn the world on its head, but...still.
Ah well. For a week i walked under the rarefied sun of original human thought. I suppose that's a week more than most get. But try out "Jenny-butt is bangin'" the next time you're at a party. Once the humor fades, you may actually feel a little different in a way that you can't even explain.