The profession of software engineer (except in those locales where “engineer” is a legally defined term, in which case I’m a computer programmer) brings with it a literal turn of mind, required in order to understand the code someone has written and you must understand. While this is hopefully something I can turn on and then off (when speaking with those human creatures who operate on other planes of existence), sometimes that discipline can leak through those compartments we make of our minds.
Thus it is with a phrase most of us will read with little concern about those things which, in my case, leap out and try to throttle me with illogic. From Archaeology magazine (August / September / October 2016, p 24) comes this tidbit by Samir Patel on ancient Morocco:
A hominin bone belonging to the species Homo rhodesiensis and around 500,000 years old, found among a large deposit of bones in a cave in Casablanca, had been cracked, gnawed, and punctured—probably by an extinct hyena.
So I’m bothered in at least two different ways. First, individual creatures do not go extinct, they die; extinction applies to species and greater groupings. Call this a semantic blunder.
Second, extinct creatures do little more than lie around and rot. They do not chew up the bones of anything, much less relations to homo sapiens. This is a sort of chronological disorder. It makes me worry that my headstone will read Here Lie The Pieces of H. White, Ripped Asunder by Saber-Toothed Tiger.
Yeah, yeah. That’s how my mind sometimes works.
[And in a bit of irony, the next day I correct the date on the magazine.]
