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Toast | May 08 2003

When I said I put a baked potato in the oven, what I meant was that I put a potato in the oven.

It was a mistake to say it was baked.

However, the next day, when I put that same potato in the oven again, I really did put a baked potato in the oven.

Still, that’s not the potato I was talking about the previous day.

Which is to say that it was the same potato, but since it hadn’t been baked yet, I was wrong to refer to it that way.

One does not speak of putting toast in the toaster; rather one puts bread in the toaster, whereupon it is toasted.

Unless one really does put toast in the toaster—this being a different matter altogether.

Allowing for this exception, to speak of bread as toast is akin to speaking of a living person as a corpse.

One does not say that one met a corpse today; instead one met a person.

Unless one really did meet a corpse, this being akin to putting toast in the toaster.

The fact that most persons will one day become corpses and likely spend some time in that state, changes nothing.

Such persons are not corpses when one meet them.

Except perhaps in a figurative sense.

Similarly one might refer to a person as toast.

Toast meaning dead, figuratively.

And dead meaning without hope, a goner, figuratively.

Assuming one can speak of a person as spending time as a corpse.

For it seems rather that time ends at the moment one’s personhood ends.

Or perhaps it ends some time earlier, if one is in a coma, say.

I speak here of time as something one experiences.

Although one might fairly say that while in a toaster, bread spends time being toasted.

Language being quite loose in this case.

For surely bread doesn’t experience being toasted.

Nor does a potato experience being baked, for that matter.

Similarly I was wrong to say that a person spends time as a corpse.

For surely a person is no longer a person at that point, so there is nothing there to spend time.

Still, one can fairly speak of a person as dead, and so something must be there to be in that state.

Dead being a state of being, evidently.

One in which there is nothing there to spend time, evidently.

By evidently I refer to the apparent meaning of dead, as opposed to there perhaps being something there to spend time, this being something else I could have meant but did not.

In any event, time would appear to be over at that point, with respect to the person previously capable of experiencing it.

The person now dead.

The person who if murdered would be called the victim.

The victim being a term that can be applied retroactively, so that one can speak of the victim as a victim in the time before the victim became a victim.

As in, The victim baked a potato, or even, The victim baked a baked potato, provided this is true vis-à-vis the potato.