Personifying The Unpersonable*

Some smoldering innuendo for your day: an assumption that matches only get to do it once and then instantly get dumped...

Of course this isn't true. Matches do not have sex lives. Maybe it is proof of a demented mind but I have cursed out the microwave when it didn't operate as wanted or happily proclaimed a certain pen a champion when it allowed me to do something I didn't think I could do; as if it could understand and correct or celebrate its behavior. But actually this personification of non-human objects, animals or other phenomena (weather, governments and other abstract concepts) is an ancient phenomena, if not art.

And they have a name for it. It's actually a form of anthropomorphism...

Anthropomorphism is any attribution of human characteristics to non-humans and began being used by humans as early as the Upper Paleolithic era, about 40,000 years ago, when hunters would empathetically identify with hunted animals to better predict their movements. Folk stories and fables, including the famous ones by Aesop, used this technique "by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events". In the 19th century Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll employed anthropomorphic elements. Why, without this personification of the unpersonable (*new word) we wouldn't have Mickey Mouse or the great Far Side cartoons. How terrible that would be.

So the next time you call a chair stupid for stubbing your toe, relax. You are actually syncing up with an ancient art and just may be on the verge of understanding that matches could have sex lives... or the Higgs boson particle may just be playing hide and seek... or how furniture may not want to be moved...