Mind the gap between your reality and the reality of others.
The safety warning "Mind the Gap" heard in many London Underground stations is well worth a post all by itself.
The blogster noticed that the announcements all have a friendly "please", either as "Please, mind the gap" or "Mind the gap, please".
The first question is: has the "please" always been part of the announcement?
The blogster would swear no, but the vagaries of memory can play ugly tricks. And wouldn't it be more stereotypically English if the phrase had been like this from its inception?
The next question is: does the underground rider get so imprinted with the phrase that it works its way out of the narrow context of train and platform into the general world view, thought and behavior?
Unlikely, but we are trying to put a bit of philosophical varnish on this post to try and understand some of the inner workings of the odd New Yorker journalist who cooked up an article subtitled as "The case against empathy". A case we will, without a hint of empathy for the author, thoroughly demolish in a future post.
Even if the English, or the British, collective subconscious has not absorbed "mind the gap", we at the K-Landnews will try to use it in a wider sense.
Much like we learned at the V&A Museum of Childhood: starting at around age five, children try out grown up things.
Please, mind the gap.
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