He is the greatest player of all time.
She is the best performer of all time.
They are the ultimate ensemble of all time.
I hear it. You hear it. We all hear it. This expression, of all time, seems overused and inappropriate. How can someone or something be anything “of all time?” This may be true if we could divine the future or use a machine to map all of time and space. Then, for sure, we could definitively say that a particular individual is the best that ever was or ever will be—in short, of all time.
But human beings cannot map all quadrants of the time-space continuum. We are hampered by our understanding of the phenomena first of all. And until we achieve the ability, we should hold the idea that someone will eventually come around that will beat the world record, make more money, and score more points. No one can ever be the best of all time.
Nowhere is the of-all-time title given more than in professional sports. Sports news is rife with the expression. It drips each week from the teleprompter like syrup off a hot waffle. Not a week slips by without the sportscaster attaching this title to a particular athlete. If you doubt this, try the following experiment: watch a week of sports news on any given channel.
The only means to end such fallacy is to ask the user to prove his assertion that the person is the [fill in the blank] of all time.
Bill: She is the best tennis player of all time?
Bob: Do you think so?
Bill: Absolutely.
Bob: Do you think someone in the future may do better?
Bill: I don’t know.
Bob: It’s certainly possible.
It is not difficult to understand that this title is usually given in a passionate way. The user is generally enraptured by the artist or athlete. It is a subjective title and as a consequence is based solely on the opinion of the user who attaches the appellation to its subject.
We could leave the decision for time to sort out. Time, after all, is the ultimate arbiter. But it alone cannot classify the best of all time because it is not sentient. Time needs the sentient being because sentience is the purveyor of the icon not its proof.
Copyright © Tyler Gant 2010 for Just Moving Along .com
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