At work yesterday, I was listening to the song “What You Came For (featuring Rihanna)” on our office music source. This is not a rare occurrence; the song gets played at least once daily. It’s one of those songs that has only a few lyrics, frequently repeated, but one doesn’t mind too much because the tune is catchy, Rihanna has beautiful voice, and listening to her voice conjures the image of Rihanna herself, which is never a bad thing. The words, limited though they are, are evocative, and despite having heard them an uncountable number of times before, today one of the lines struck me, specifically, the declaration that “lightning strikes every time she moves.”
This sounds like the description of someone well worth avoiding. I mean, if lightning strikes every time she moves, she would indeed be a very dangerous person. Just how dangerous would depend on how we interpret “every time she moves”. Does it count even if she merely twitches her finger? Does breathing count as moving? Imagine the carnage, to say nothing of the ozone, that would surround such a woman!
Then I thought more carefully and realized that I was drawing unwarranted conclusions. After all, the lyrics just say that lightning strikes every time she moves. They don’t say that lightning strikes where she is, every time she moves. If we assume that lightning is striking somewhere on Earth at nearly every instant—and if that’s not quite true, it’s surely striking on Jupiter, and possibly also on Neptune, if not on Earth—it can honestly be said of pretty much anyone that lightning strikes every time that she, or he, moves.
It’s a bit like that old statement about drinking early in the day: It’s always five o’clock somewhere. Now, this at least cannot be strictly true. It would only be precisely true every hour on the hour. But one could make the statement accurate just by saying that it’s always after five somewhere, and that would take care of the nitpicking.
This led me to wonder just what generalizations that sound dramatic might be true in a trivial sense pretty much anywhere. It didn’t take long to come up with some. One could, for instance, make the seemingly terrifying statement that “everyone who pisses me off dies,” and be telling the truth (unless the transhumanist movement is correct, and some of the people who are currently alive will never die because of advances in technology). Still, even if people end up extending their lives to a tremendous degree, it seems likely that the universe itself will eventually arrive at a state where no life of any kind is possible. This is probably an inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (see here). If there is no escape allowed by the laws of physics from this eventual universal heat death, it’s not unreasonable to say that everyone alive will eventually die. Thus, it is a true statement—as far as it goes—that everyone who pisses me off dies. It’s also true, unfortunately, that everyone who doesn’t piss me off dies. But when you’re trying to be scary, I guess you’re not required to make full disclosure.
In a similar vein, one could threaten someone into doing what one wants by saying to them, “If you don’t do exactly what I say, you are going to die.” This, again, is a true statement, even if the speaker never has any intention of killing or otherwise harming the person being addressed. What’s more, even if the person does exactly what you say, they are still going to die. It may take years—a dozen, a hundred, a million, a trillion, who knows?—but it’s a reasonable assumption that eventually each person will die. That’s probably a better assumption even than the guess that lightning is always striking somewhere whenever a woman in a song moves.
The dread super-villain, Dr. Pedantic, might well choose to elaborate on his threats, saying, “If you do not do as I say, you will die. And I don’t just mean that you will eventually die, but that you will die sometime within the next seventy-two hours, approximately, and it will be a painful, violent death at my hands—figuratively speaking—unless something else, by chance, kills you before I have the opportunity to do so. And, of course, barring any intervening events that make it impossible for me to carry out a violent act upon you, such as my own death or capture. However, these are relatively unlikely events, and though past performance is not a guarantee of future results, I have not yet failed to carry out such actions when they were warranted against someone who failed to obey my commands. And to be clear, there have been other such people.”
Dr. Pedantic gets a bit boring sometimes, and his would-be victims occasionally lose track of what he’s trying to get them to do; he doesn’t quite get the art of using intimidating rhetoric. Neither does he grasp the intention of such poetry as the statement that lightning strikes every time a woman moves; he doesn’t understand that the song is actually just saying that she is such a “striking” figure that, no matter what she does, she almost always seizes the attention of those who happen to observe her.
In any case, as the song says, whether or not lightning literally strikes every time she moves, it’s not that important, because even when everyone’s watching her, she’s looking at you. Aren’t you lucky? At least, you’re lucky if the words are figurative, much more than than you would be if she were, literally, emitting large bolts of discharged static electricity with every movement.
But even if the statement is meant in an entirely figurative sense, you’re still not safe. After all, no matter what you do, everyone is going to die some day.
Probably.
Iterations of Zero 