Home › Daily Prompt › #FOWC › NON-VERBAL AND PRESCIENT – Marilyn Armstrong

NON-VERBAL AND PRESCIENT – Marilyn Armstrong

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FOWC with Fandango — Prescient

The definition of the word means “knowing events or information before it is available,” but the word is usually used to mean “having a sense of what is coming.” Like me, having a sick feeling despite all the surveys, Hillary was not going to win. It is also prescient knowing that the little squirrel is hiding in the branch of that tree, waiting for me to stop waiting by the window so he can come back for more black seeds.

We have one young one who is totally hooked on black sunflower seeds and will settle for nothing else. He would be there 24 hours a day if I didn’t occasionally come outside and tell him he really needs to move on.

Prescient is that feeling you get when someone very sick is going to die … you just “feel” it. I’ve often watched my dogs communicate with each other. Without words, they seem to know what the others want — or they are letting them know what’s happening with just a nose-to-nose sniff.

Animals use non-verbal communication constantly. It isn’t prescient … it’s just non-verbal communications that I bet we could use if we wanted to. I suspect we did, too, before we started to chatter all the time. I think we all could, like our dogs, tell each other “things” without words or formal knowledge. We still do it. Couples use “the look” a lot. It’s the look which says “let’s split” or “that guy’s an idiot.” We know the look, we know its meaning. We pick right up on it.

So we are all prescient at some level.

Can I read tomorrow’s news without a newspaper? Sure I can. Trump will do something insulting and evil while everyone acts as if it’s normal. England will still not know what to do about Brexit. Half the world will hate refugees and the other half will be refugees.

Most foreknowledge is solidly based on past knowledge. You know what always happens, so you have no doubts what is about to happen. Is that prescience or experience? Both?

These days, I think our whole world is prescient.

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Categories: #FOWC, Communications, Daily Prompt, Fandango's One Word Challenge, Humor

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8 replies

  1. Kiki
    04/05/2019 • 05:32

    Great definition of this difficult word….

    In the German language we use it also very much in the sense of ‚visionary‘ – it seems (to me) that nowadays it‘s mostly used in a condescending, negative sense of foreseeing something bad (well, there is mostly ‚bad‘ to foresee, right). Btw (and that was always troubling to me) all my ‚prophetic‘ dreams were to disclose ‚bad‘ news, and involved deaths, accidents, crisis…..

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  2. Melanie B Cee
    04/04/2019 • 13:52

    Knowing the future (foretell. predict, prophesy, prognosticate, divine, foresee, announce in advance, forecast, soothsay, tell fortunes, cast a horoscope, vaticinate, foreknow, forebode, augur, betoken, portend, foreshadow, adumbrate, foretoken, presage, prefigure, foreshow) about that orange tw*twaffle doesn’t take any ESP nor particular skill. One only has to look to the past to see exactly what will happen. Every single day until that pile o’ poo is ousted (or murdered). I predict that IF that moron gets a second term, some people will jump out of windows in tall buildings, something akin to what happened in the first market crash and subsequent depression (1930s version). That kind of future does not bear thinking about.

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    • Marilyn Armstrong
      04/04/2019 • 15:21

      I think that’s probably true of most predictions. It’s not that we know the future. More to the point, we know what has already happened and can reasonably predict that the future will BE like the past. But I’m pretty sure we didn’t think it would be THIS bad.

      Hey, there’s some interesting news from your Church. Big article on LSD changing their attitude towards gay people and changing the service and other things. I think if you haven’t caught up, you will find it very interesting. I certainly did. Our country may be going backward, but not all the people IN IT are going with it. There IS hope. Maybe not quickly, but there’s a spark of it out there.

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  3. swo8
    04/04/2019 • 12:31

    We are going through some serious business here with our politics. Our Attorney General and another notable and might I say “truly Honourable” member of Parliament was booted out of caucus. Apparently our ‘handsome’ the guy with the nice hair(PM) was trying to usurp the Rule of Law. So we are getting this sense of prescience about our news. It’s a story that just doesn’t stop.

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    • Marilyn Armstrong
      04/04/2019 • 15:24

      It is everywhere and it is very frightening. If it were JUST here or JUST there or JUST in Australia or somewhere else, it would not be so scary. You’d think “Well, MOST of the world is still the world I recognize.” But it’s all around the globe and so painfully like the 1930s.

      I want to punch these morons in the head and say “HEY, HOW DID NATIONALISM WORK OUT LAST TIME YOU JERK!” But they aren’t listening, they don’t know any history and if they did, they have rearranged it to make it suit their needs. These are evil days.

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