OUT OF THE QUESTION

August 6th, 2019

To recap a few previous Tinkered Thinking episodes, we can take the word ‘question’ and simply lop off the last three letters to get a Tinkered Thinking idea of what this word means.  A good question, a real question sets the mind off on a quest. 

It pulls a few other things into focus regarding how we use the word question.  For instance, when someone says “It’s out of the question.” 

What does such a person mean?  Merely that the suggestion proffered will not be entertained.  Quite literally it means that whatever suggestion will not be a part of the mental quest that all involved will take on the subject at hand.

A question, in some sense is an instrument for creating a story.  Often the story is what we must discover to explain the possibilities that we wonder about, to bring reality to our ponderings.  Or rather, bring our ponderings to the hard boiled facts of reality.

To say that something is out of the question is to refuse outright that something has any chance of being part of the story. 

This cacophony of language we constantly use, is, at the end of the day, a story that is constantly rewriting itself.  Even within fields that seem more grounded like math and physics, the story of these fields evolves as discoveries are made, and more importantly, these stories evolve when a good question is posed, and the quest for a different angle begins and ultimately illuminates a new corner of the story.

It begs to wonder: if it’s not out of the question, does that mean that something is…

in question?