Grapevine: Only real strawberries count

On the minus side, things can go infinitely smaller. On the plus side, things can go infinitely bigger. Nice to think about strawberries going, let us say, much bigger.

You might hear you go minus or plus infinity about the number of strawberries, but mind you, the Founders stated you couldn’t owe for strawberries that never existed, or so I guess they would have said in case. Only real strawberries count.

I’m telling about infinity, because we have the symbol with grammar, so I thought it would be good to compare some other matter you get the symbol too. Plus or minus infinity can be quite tricky. You need to reckon what your zero is.

Well, let me think about a basket of strawberries. Bob takes 2 strawberries from the basket, and then he puts 2 strawberries in. There is no change in quantity, -2 and +2 is zero change.
-2 + 2 = 0

It is not zero strawberries. We still have a basket of them, and two strawberries are back in again.

Now think Bob takes two strawberries from the basket and puts the same strawberries right back in. There’s no change in quality.
-2 (-) -2 = 0

Math generalizes on quality. Two minuses add up to a plus, and math wouldn’t tell if Bob puts the same strawberries back in, which might not matter only sometimes. This is how we can write the thing above.
-2 +2 = 0

Math is good for quantity. A plus and a minus make a minus.
-2 (+)- 2 = -4
-2 and -2 is -4
-2-2 = -4

The stopwatch goes to plus infinity on the left-hand side. It is on the left we get more and more hours. The minus infinity is on the right-hand side. The stopwatch goes to the right, for smaller and smaller pieces of time. It takes little time sometimes, to eat a strawberry.

Aunt Cantrella said the quality minus infinity was a very good idea to help her cope with the jet lag. Those were — however quite many — only very tiny qualities of time to be on the plane. She comes from France to visit every year.

For language, infinity is a bit like the indefinite or ■PI. Wheels are not endless, and they have the pi. Even if we counted all words of all languages, we could never tell exactly what we’d be about to hear or see in a context. Well, I do not know if words could be all counted for English alone, and there is sure no way to predict on phrases, as we people make them in real and quality time.

People may talk figures of speech sometimes, so you get to hear that math is, well, a language. Bob is the youngest, so you could say he is not grown up yet to have that real or scientist gumption, but we can’t beat him on the kit and caboodle, how you’d say it in math, he asked, and he was about improving his bike, quite a regular thing.

In writing and reading, language can go left-to-right, as English, or right-to-left, as some other scripts, but math goes left to right only. To give you an example, -1 (+2 – 2) +1 is just an elaborate way to write zero, 0, because you go step-by-step from left to right, and you only take those figures in parentheses together.

Without those brackets, you’d have -1 +2 -2 +1, and you’d be going as -1 +2 is 1; 1 -2 is -1, and -1 +1 is zero. Sometimes the brackets are there just for gumption, but sometimes they make a difference -1 +3 x 2 is 4, and -1 + (3 x 2) is 5.

In language, parentheses always bring in, as a comment or circumstance. There are no “minus words”, as -kit or -caboodle. There can be figures of speech.

The idea of infinity really came with language. First people saw things had ends, and then people thought some things might be without end. Language can go on infinitely forever. Try our vaulters and mergers.

Infinity may not be something that actually never ends, but we may choose never to decide on any such end. For me and strawberries and language, just forget about ending that. Try the ideas here: