There is an irrelevance to everything, and a relevance to everything; all things relate, and all are unrelated.
This is one of many thoughts of chocolate bunnies. However, this word-meandering(tm) is not about that particular thought; it is rather about a generalization of such thoughts.
Might such thoughts BE generalizable? Well... if everything is irrelevant to everything else, then so are these words to each other; while at the same time, they ARE relevant to each other; but then again, irrelevance is itself irrelevant to the concept of generalization, and so that conclusion doesn't help in answering the question.
I think I know what this means.
It means that chocolate bunnies don't think.
The Crazy Story
If I look up the word 'crazy' by asking the google search engine, "what does the word crazy mean" I get various results after expanding the answer. (some answers are deemed unwanted to a sufficient degree such that google assumes that the reader will appreciate having them hidden by default, while still being made aware that they exist). The first meaning is 'mentally deranged' as in "Stella went crazy..."; I won't bother relating any of the other meanings. I will, however, note the etymology of the word, which google gives in the same response : in the late 16th century, it meant "full of cracks."
I often prefer the etymology of a word when thinking of what it "means." Perhaps that's because the words seem more poetic to me that way. I assume that the 'cracks' referred to are in the sense of what you might find in old porcelain - those cracks on the surface, indicating that the thing, once useful, is undergoing stress, and is about to break under that stress, thus becoming no longer useful - at least, no longer useful with respect to what that 'thing' is supposed to do.
Imagine a story with cracks in it. What is a crack, in THAT sense? Perhaps a fault (heh) in logic, somewhere in the content of the story, such that if one pays attention one may realize that the story does not make "sense." It breaks a rule of some sort, by itself representing a break in logic.
A Dadaist story, I suppose, is a crazy story. It embraces the absurd, like accepting a division by zero.
Some people, such as myself, like crazy things, in the above sense of being absurd. I wonder why that is. There seems to be a sort of humor intrinsic to it, somehow.
And now, a poem.
Higgledy-piggledy eat me some porridge. When I die, I wonder what people would think if I had requested that my tombstone read "Gone a-whoring." Would they think at all? They would. But their thoughts would probably have nothing to do with me, or what I was, or what I might then be. Especially if they had never stumbled upon my grave, and thus were unaware of my tombstone. Higgledy-piggledy eat me some porridge, and no, I will not use the word storage. Oops, too late.
Google Translate is the Haven of the Lazy
I did a google translation of the phrase 'higgledy-piggledy.' At the time of writing, it identifies the phrase as Javanese, and translates it to English as 'higgledy-piggledy.' At first I believed the identification as Javanese was mistaken; but then I realized that my belief was just an assumption. I mean, it COULD be one of those words that was borrowed into the English language.
So I typed the question "what does higgledy-piggledy mean" into the google search engine. It tells me that it means "in confusion or disorder." As per usual I select "more definitions" because I want to see the etymology; and it tells me that in the late 16th century it was a rhyming jingle, perhaps involved with the action of herding pigs. Curiously, there is no etymological language mentioned.
I now believe that the identification of the phrase as Javanese is mistaken, because otherwise google translate would have mentioned that language in its nugget of wisdom. Or would it have done so? It's always possible that google is inconsistent with itself. Surely that couldn't POSSIBLY be the case.
On Assumptions
We all make assumptions. We need to; it's like filling in the cracks on a sidewalk. You wouldn't want to fall down a crack in the sidewalk, would you? Of course not. So we fill in the cracks, allowing the sidewalk to function as a sidewalk - that is, as a conveyor belt that forces you to do all the work. Or as a really inefficient escalator. In other words, what it is 'meant' to be.
I read once that some languages have more repeating elements in them than others, and that those languages are often spoken on islands. I won't bother to cite a source for that, because I'm lazy (note my playing with google translate above). Actually, i just lied. But did I? The thing is, the source that I cited just gives an abstract of an article, and to read the actual article online costs fifty dollars. Well, I'm not going to pay 50 dollars just to find out if the article confirms that what I read once about languages was accurate, or at least has corroborating evidence. If it DOES happen to support the idea that repeating elements (as in 'higgledy-piggledy') are found more often in island languages than in non-island ones, then I lied. But if it DOESN'T, then I didn't lie. I assume here that citing a source for something only makes sense if the source which is cited supports what you say.
I'll do an experiment. I'll use google translate to "translate" a nonsense phrase which I will make up, and which contains repeated elements - namely, the phrase "gogo-maloney." (I note that whatever algorithm is used by my browser to underline mis-spelt words as I type them with squiggly red lines has flagged gogo-maloney as such a word, while higgledy-piggledy is not subjected to the same treatment - from which fact I assume that gogo-maloney is nonsense, while higgledy-piggledy is not). Then I will see if the language of an island nation is selected as the source, on the hypothesis that google translate is "guessing" on the source language of an unknown word based at least partly on the repetition of sounds within the word. This is actually a very bad experiment, because there are so many other factors that are not being accounted for, and also because I am running the experiment with only one sample. But that's fine, I'm lazy. Here we go.
There we went. Did you get what I got? English detected. Hmmm, wait a minute... England is an island.
