|
|
|
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
|
OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Quite a while back, I found fault with use of the word "fungible" in TIME which said
"Loyalties in Afghanistan are fungible". Fungible is basically a legal term for commodities
that are interchangeable - any ton of wheat can be substituted for another ton of
wheat in securing a loan.
Today I encountered the word referring to an obstration in a way which I can accept:
Of course, such accounts of modernization, like all stories cultures tell about themselves,
combine historical truths with a certain degree of myth-making. Theorists have assigned
the clock a metaphorical role in the modernization of Western life that extends far beyond
its functional value as a particular machine; as Mumford would have it, the clock "marks a
perfection toward which other machines aspire." [19] As a result, the clock has become
what Hayden White calls a "verbal artifact" of a certain way of thinking about modernity,
a trope that, when unpacked, reveals some of the underlying values and presumptions
implicit in that way of thinking. [20] In large part, the clock's "perfection" as a modern
artifact has been located in its ability to rationalize time intocountable and
fungible units, a process that aligns the clock in a theoretical way with
the frameworkof modernity as historians and philosophers have defined it.
[21] Both proponents and critics of modernity have consistently identified the
abstraction of time and space into grids based not on nature but on human
reason as central developments in Western culture over the past four hundred
years. The result of such rationalization, the theorists tell us, is a world made
over to suit the needs of a capitalist market.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Another use of "fungible" in a way I can accept:
The issue of corporate downsizing has provided many examples of the
shallowness of the media. Typical was a seven-part series in the New York
Times in March 1996 entitled "The Downsizing of America. " The articles
focused almost exclusively on the displacement and adjustment of workers, but
said little about the benefits to consumers and other workers. This passage in
the first article is about all the reporter had to say about that: "Some contend
that through these adjustments American companies will recapture their past
dominance in world markets, and once again be in a position to deliver higher
income to most workers.
Others predict that creating such fungible workforces will leave businesses
with dispirited and disloyal employees who will be less productive. And many
economists and chief executives think the job shuffling may be a permanent
fixture, always with us, as if the nation had caught a chronic, rasping cough."
|
|
|
|
Forums16
Topics13,913
Posts229,331
Members9,182
| |
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
|
|
|
0 members (),
824
guests, and
1
robot. |
|
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
|
|
|
|
