Wocket Powered Thought

Earlier, Maia and I were reading Dr. Seuss's "There's a Wocket in My Pocket!" which is a book that I've read approximately 8,476,231 times in the last six years, when Maia did something that made me think of it in a new way: she turned the book upside down on the page with the Geeling on the ceiling. This is nothing new. Approximately 2,937,576 of the 8,476,231 times that I've read the book have been in the inverse position. But for whatever reason, this time it meant something else.

I think she looked at the Geeling and saw that something wasn't quite right about him sitting on the ceiling and decided that the way to remedy that was to turn the book upside down so that it looked like the Geeling was sitting on the floor. Of course, the narrator was then sitting upside down, so the success of the experiment was mixed at best.

So, here's the thought that was inspired (I will leave it to you to determine if it was actually an inspired thought or not): If someone were to sit on the ceiling, would they be "sitting up" instead of "sitting down"? Carried to other positional descriptions, would lying on the ceiling actually mean you were lying up? Would standing on the ceiling mean you were actually standing down? How did our more commonly, and gravitationally law abiding, terms come to be in the first place?

Okay, goofy musing at best, but I still kind of enjoy turning words, terms and phrases on their heads to see what I might learn about them.

I am working on a couple of other, more serious posts, but I'm taking some time with them and chipping away at them here and there. I can't guarantee when they'll actually be read by anybody else, but they are in the works.