Yes, two posts in one day.

I don't believe I wasted a perfectly good afternoon debating abortion (see below). Not even abortion though, religion with somebody who I knew couldn't sway no mattyer how good the argument I made.

I tried to be patient, but I didn't succeed, especially when the good Christian lady told me the tact I had to take to have any chance to persuade them. The things she (as far as I could tell, it was a she) was telling me to do sounded more like things she thought she needed to convert me. I declined.

The funny turn came when I called Christianity a cult, just like Scientology. She asked me to give a definition for "cult." I didn't want to go there, it wasn't like I used a remote meaning, and I hate definitional arguments. Sure enough, once she saw I used it correctly she began quoting the Latin and French meaning of the word.

This has to be the silliest thing about definitional arguments, using a word in the absolutely correct way only to be told that the Romans didn't have that meaning for a similar-sounding word. No, and we also don't structure our grammar in the proper, Latin way either, fortunately. Why do 2,000-year dead people have any prescriptive say over how words are used now? They were, without a doubt, using their words wrong according to the way the Indo-Europeans spoke 2,000 years before them.

So, now I've wasted the afternoon. I go to a writers' meeting tonight. Tomorrow morning, I get a tooth fixed, and if I feel up to it, I was going to write my short story in the afternoon, and I hope, finish the draft. In the evening, I go to a different writers' group. Going now . . .