The Bridges of Venkat County

March 3 2023

I’ve burnt a few bridges in my short life. Some bridges have water under them, but most don’t. I was obsessed with idioms when I started writing this post — perhaps because the reading for the research seminar that week was on Construction grammars, where idioms (and constructions of all kinds) are as essential as syntactic categories, lexical items and morphemes. I might be misunderstanding construction grammar considering I have only read a few papers about it, but I’ll take this opportunity regardless to overuse various constructions to death, violating one of Orwell’s maxims.

It was only recently that I realized that sometimes, frayed and broken relationships cannot be fixed. I could apologize, make up for my mistakes and shortcomings, undo all the harm I’ve caused, and yet. I think I learned that a sincere apology transfers the responsibility onto the other person to forgive, forget, and accept you back. The truth is that there is no moral or natural law that mandates people forgive, forget and accept after a sincere apology, nor would I want there to be.

All of this may seem obvious in hindsight, but this is my blog after all. I can write about the trivial as if they were life-altering revelations.