This is a special post for quick takes by Linch. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Shakespeare's "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" doesn't actually make any sense.
(One quick point of confusion: "Wherefore" in Shakespeare's time means "Why", not "Where?" In modern terms, it might be translated as "Romeo, Romeo, why you gotta be Romeo, yo?")
But think a bit more about the context of her lament: Juliet's upset that her crush, Romeo, comes from an enemy family, the Montagues. But why would she be upset that he's named Romeo? Juliet's problem with the "Romeo Montague" name isn't (or shouldn't be) the "Romeo" part, it's clearly the Montague!
I pointed this out before multiple times and as far as I know nobody has proffered a convincing explanation.
If you agree with my analysis, there are several interesting points:
There is a common misconception: the meaning of “wherefore”
Given that, there’s also common knowledge that this is a common misconception
After the misconception is fixed and people knew what Shakespeare was talking about “why”, it STILL doesn’t make sense
Very few people appear to notice that it doesn’t make sense.
I believe points 2-4 are not unrelated to each other! I think a lot of people subconsciously go through this process:
Dumb people think that line in Shakespeare’s dialogue doesn’t make sense
I do not wish to be dumb
Therefore I believe that line in Shakespeake’s dialogue makes sense.
I think the generalization of this phenemenon is a gaping hole in intellectual spaces. At least, if you care about truth-seeking! Just because a position is commonly held by stupid people doesn’t mean it’s false! Further, just because stupid people believe bad reason X for Y doesn’t mean you ought to turn off your brain in independently evaluating whether Y is true!
Put another way, people should have much higher affordance to “dare to be stupid.”