I was talking with a friend today about my slowly dawning worry, after over four hundred consecutive blog posts, that I might inadvertently begin to repeat myself.
In my nightmare scenario I spring out of bed one morning, full of vim and enthusiasm, and blog about some cool topic or other that has brilliantly popped into my head overnight. Then about an hour or two later – or worse, a day later – some astute reader points out that I had already written a post on pretty much the same topic about eight or nine months earlier.
Perhaps then I would need to start worrying every day that this is merely the beginning of a pattern, some persistent failure of memory. Would I need to start obsessively reading over all previous posts, preemptively studying the oeuvre in its entirety to avoid such embarrassing and useless repetitions?
Today, when I expressed these dark thoughts to my friend, he told me that this concern of mine, whether legitimate or not, would make an excellent subject for a blog post. Well ok then, here it is.
But now I worry. This question about repeating myself seems vaguely familiar. Might I, perhaps, have posted it before….
There are some core themes and values which are central to each of us.
From time to time, we all inadvertently repeat ourselves, sometimes tangentially and sometimes more directly, about subjects near this core.
A series of girlfriends criticized me for repeating myself. One praised me for the identical “offense”: my wife. 🙂
Repetition can also be the path to understanding what it is that you’re actually addressing. I find myself revisiting topics and ideas all the time – and suddenly seeing that I’m at the same topic, but a different level.
So… blog away and leave the statistical repetition analysis to your faithful readers.
…not directly related to anything you said: I did not know the word “vim” signified anything but the text editor, which is a little scary (!)
“Vim” is an accusative – which has nothing to do with accusations.
It means a noun that exists solely as an object of verbs, never as the subject. So you can say “He was full of vim.” But you can’t say “Vim crashed the party and went home with a cute girl.”
Unless of course you’re talking about the text editor, and the text editor gets lucky. 🙂
“Nobody felt accused, everybody was smitten with his vim.”
Is that English at all? 🙂