https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-lo5HCGr7g

The work of Neil Postman–who was both an accomplished scholar and athlete–is well known to general semanticists. In this session, we focused on Postman’s 1976 book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk – and What to Do About It (1976). Postman defined “crazy talk” as “talk that may be entirely effective but which has unreasonable or evil or, sometimes, overwhelmingly trivial purposes. It is talk that creates an irrational context for itself or sustains an irrational conception of human interaction." “Stupid talk” is “talk that has…a confused direction or an inappropriate tone or a vocabulary not well-suited to its context. It is talk…that does not and cannot achieve its purposes.” In this session, a panel of participants presented the best examples of crazy and stupid talk that they had recently encountered. The audience awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals to the craziest and stupidest talk presented by the panelists.