Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
  • About Us
  • Cast
  • Store
  • Extras
  • Original Art for Sale
  • Our Patreon
RSS
2012-02-15
‹‹ First ‹ Prev Buy! Comments(7) Next › Last ››

2012-02-15

by shaenon on February 15, 2012 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Choose
Comments RSS

Discussion (7) ¬

  1. SotiCoto
    August 20, 2014, 9:30 am | # | Reply

    Nick… just tell him you got Robocopped and leave it at that.

  2. Dementron
    December 15, 2016, 10:08 am | # | Reply

    I love mu. It’s really something we need in English. It eliminates catch-22s like the classic “Have you stopped beating your wife” question. That, and sometimes people just ask bad questions.

    • Clifton
      June 20, 2017, 12:36 am | # | Reply

      Pedant time!

      Whoever popularized that “unask the question” explanation has much to answer for, as does Douglas Hofstadter with his “neither true nor false” explanation.

      For what it’s worth “mu” doesn’t *actually* mean anything remotely like that. “Mu” just means “No” in ancient Chinese, transliterated into Japanese. It isn’t any kind of clever wordplay either. It’s just “no”.

      (The challenge to break through in Zen practice is what that “no” expresses.)

      • Sam Setter
        October 26, 2018, 8:44 am | # | Reply

        “The difference between desire and decision, that is the distance between yes and no” – Rebekkah DeMere

      • awgiedawgie
        October 26, 2018, 12:37 pm | # | Reply

        Bigger pedant time…

        It’s not a matter of what the word “literally” means. (And since the end meaning of words – particularly in Japanese and Chinese – depends largely on context, “mu” does not have a literal meaning. It simply implies a negative condition.) It’s a matter of how the word is used. And how the word is used is that no answer can exist with the conditions given. Answering “mu” is the same as saying “I can’t answer that question.”

        • khn0
          October 17, 2021, 8:05 am | # | Reply

          Almost (or pretty much YMMV) the definition of an abstention vote

      • jdreyfuss
        January 21, 2020, 9:21 am | # | Reply

        My understanding was that its meaning is closer to “nothingness” than plain “no,” which is the reason it was used to answer a stupid question. Rather than acknowledge the question, even as a negative, the answerer is disregarding its validity by saying that there is no answer to the question posed, even though the question poses a dichotomy.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

More by Jeff

  • The Scrivnarium

More by Shaenon

  • Horror Every Day
  • Li'l Mell
  • Monster of the Week
  • Narbonic
  • Shaenon.com
Creative Commons License
Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.skin-horse.com.

©2007-2022 Skin Horse | Powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑