Labelled World

I was walking down the street the other day, as I do frequently, and a funny thought popped into my head, as they do frequently. Try this one on for size. What if the world were like a Richard Scarry book? That is, that everything around us is labelled? So, if this were true, the computer I’m typing on would have a two-dimensional label floating above it that said “Laptop” with a straight line pointing to it. These labels however, actually take up space in the world. These aren’t the labels from that TD commercial where the words can pass through stuff. These words are real and exist in time and space. So while trying to walk from your desk to the kitchen for a snack you might have dodge words that said, “Door,” “Stairs,” “Fridge,” “Milk,” Glass,” etc you get the point. But what if the words could rotate on their line that is pointing to the object. That way you could brush them out of the way. Now think about how many words would be floating around in the world. They’d be everywhere, including floating around you. “Shirt,” “Pants,” “Watch,” would follow you around all day. However, the words are proportionally as big as the objects. So “Watch” would be say a couple of inches long, while “house”
may be a couple of feet long. There would be so many words that running late to class would be even more common than it is now. What did take you five minutes to get to class now takes you ten because of the amount of word pollution that is floating around. You would have to watch out for words like “Shoe” because you could trip over it. There could even be so many words floating in the air that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere could drop too low. Now that being said, words like “Grass” would not have to be repeated for every blade of grass. There would be just one label for grass for every time you crossed into a new “page” of the world, which for our purposes could be defined as one squared kilometre. New words would form as that object is happening. So a house being built would say “H” one day and the successive letters would appear more each day as the “House” was completed. Or as you were talking, perhaps complaining about a tough midterm you’d just had, the word “Whiner” would appear above your head. In that way the labels would act as a sort of mood ring. People would be more compelled to be in a good mood and have labels like “Generous” or “Likeable.” No one would want to walk around with the word “Jerk,” or “Conceited” above their heads. Think of the possibilities if you could know exactly what somebody else was like at that time. No more awkward dates. If the guy shows up with “Chauvinistic” above his head and the girl has “Controlling” above hers, you could just shake hands and part ways, instead of discovering these two months down the road. Think of the possibilities. Now after writing this, and hopefully for you after reading this, are envisioning little black labels floating all over the place. If nothing else, it makes me laugh.

Peter.Concepts.Inc.