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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

I thought the idea was to have quotes that explicitly used the word cement, not just quotes pertaining to what keeps society together.

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It's good that it's a purely syntactic collection. Viewed semantically, the "cement of society" produces a strange image, as if a single event could, once set in a given form, hold society together forever and ever thereafter. I think society is held together by a process, not an event, so what could the "X of society" be in that case? "The covalent (primary) as well as van der Waals and hydrogen bonds (secondary) of society" makes for a rather unwieldy metaphor.

If I ever put together a Humanistpunk band, it'll be called "The Cement Trucks of Society"...

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8FAJXPBdOg&t=190

(TIL feltpunk is a thing.)

>Viewed semantically, the "cement of society" produces a strange image, as if a single event could, once set in a given form, hold society together forever and ever thereafter.

But the collection doesn't concern events, at least the majority of it, but attributes or customs or ideals, etc...

I think that says more about the aptitude of the metaphors in the collection than about whether "cement of society" (where cement normally is poured and ignored) is the best metaphor we can use for what I see: "X of society" where X is an agglutinative process that needs constant renewal (first gained then maintained?) by a society's members.

(In my society we often speak of "tisser des liens" to weave society together, but I think felting is a stronger metaphor than weaving or knitting. The artificial structures of the latter two can be unravelled relatively easily by pulling at loose ends, but the random interlacings of the former resist such abuses.)

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrMwxe2ya5E&t=346

The electromagnetism of social cohesion

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