4 ms·

"the sad Zeitgeist of our time notwithstanding" This sounds like one of those sentences that sound deep but don't mean anything. Can you explain?

• sndean 10y ago
  "Even though it seems that words have diminished meaning in our modern society." Or something like that.
• llamaz 10y ago
  Despite the Zeitgeist [1] of naming things after war or terrorism [2] hopefully words still have meaning [3]. [1]: spirit of the times/current fashion/popular tendencies [2]: which causes war/terrorism to lose meaning because it refers to everything [3]: compare with [2]
• HSO 10y ago
  I didn't mean to be pompous. My native tongue is German and I didn't know a better word than Zeitgeist for what I wanted to say. I feel that language in general is being used in a different way today than even just a few years ago. Admittedly, I don't have objective measures for this but I know I am not alone in this assessment. Even the Economist recently ran a feature about this lamentable phenomenon.
  • wreft 10y ago
    Thank you. I wasn't trying to be rude either and really appreciate the response!
• dredmorbius 10y ago
  Zeitgeist has the meaning not only of "the spirit of the times" (literal translation), but of the sense of a binding or constraining dominant ideals and beliefs of a time, which can be viewed as proscribing a cage within which a set of contemporaneously accessible ideas are constrained. The idea was promoted by Albert Szent-Gyorgi in a 1970 book, The Crazy Ape. There's a good overview of the concept in this VSauce2 video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cgOFQcNZiFk&t=9m43s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cgOFQcNZiFk&t=9m43s I'm finding the top-level complaint registered, its note, and significance on this discussion overstated and distracting.