DOYLC

A few days ago my son was getting same day surgery and I was forced to sit in a waiting room for longer than I wanted.  The usual trash TV was being shown to keep the nervous relatives quiet, and there was a typical "self-help" show on which featured some bizarre members of the general public, each of whom had issues that apparently had some entertainment value. A phrase that kept coming up was various variations of "define yourself", as in "How do you define yourself?", or "Don't let your [whatever problem the person had] define you".  It occurred to me that the purveyors of these phrases must have had only a fuzzy idea of what they were saying.  They were probably repeating a cliché they had heard before, to save themselves the difficulty of thinking and finding a way to express their thoughts. Definitions for Concepts, Identities for Individuals So what was wrong with asking "How Do You Define Yourself?" The answer is that defin...