Pedantry eats itself

Toph Tucker
Compass and Rule
Published in
2 min readFeb 9, 2014

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“Is there anything more American than America?” is not quite tautological, if you accept that languages like English routinely overload terms and love implicit nuance. “Less is more” is not self-contradictory; it’s just a reminder that variables are not necessarily monotonically positively correlated, i.e. that less x may mean more y. “It is what it is.” People say these things, and seem to find them useful, and logic dictates we update our prior estimate of their emptiness.

If “American” is taken to be an adjectival vector based on some moving average of weighted known characteristics of America, thus a lagging indicator, and “America” is a taken to be the country and its affiliates at the present moment, then it is totally possible to be more American than America. But it would probably be a sort of overfitness. One can imagine specific things being more American than America over certain scopes and time periods, but in the long run it’d be hard to outperform.

The “America’s Import” tagline seems to slyly nod at Fiat ownership. Can a foreign entity represent the spirit of America more faithfully than America itself? Sure! Happens all the time!

But, but, but—

There are valid interpretations such that it’s strictly tautological. Besides, the ad rings false. The statement may be precisely consistent, but it’s generally off-base, and that’s the problem, not any semantics. I’m conflating things. It’s hypocrisy. I clearly didn’t think about the possibility that… we’re all imports, really, today, there’s no such thing as imports, while the irony is that, exceptionalism and smarm, and criticism matters. In reality the problem is this shallow discourse around a Super Bowl ad when the world is burning, but no that’s, and, whereas, you may not have realized, but, actually…

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