Saturday, May 26, 2007

Peace Planets?

This week, the Staples Center is hosting a Star Wars event. I am not sure of the details, but when talking by today, there were long lines. There were also people wearing strange outfits and weapons--albeit toy ones.

There is nothing new on going on a trip against a society that seems to encourage war in this way, but I am still tempted to think about the concept of a Peace Planets movie series. How many people would this attract? Is this an unrealistic idea, perhaps in part because the Peace Train has limited capacity and is likely to be confined to terrestrial travel?

One might argue that the analogy is flawed for complex grammatical reasons. Is there, for one thing, a meaningful plural of "peace," or is peace a default phenomenon that is not readily separable into discrete events? Nominally, "wars" in "Star Wars" is in the plural. "Star" is technically singular, but as a matter of pragmatics, the word becomes plural by implication when the context is considered. One could envision one peaceful planet, but once plurality is involved, at the planet level, the grammatically correct expression nominally has to be distributed exactly oppositely to the "star" version.

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