(no subject)

This preliminary jotting constrained by my time might be better put in my actual journal, but I might develop it later; at any rate, I wanted to get these thoughts down because in theory I should be preparing for my Chinese test and the HSK today, not having long abstract trains of thought, but of course I want to think about it later. At any rate, this means everything I write here will not be explained/justified as much as it is in my head, for now. I just had a discussion in "argument lesson" (which used to be more lawyer-like one-sided arguments, but I objected to that so violently, and my classmates often objected too, that it is usually more enlightened discussion now) with another Harvard student whom I do not particularly like, about what an "intellectual" person is; it was refreshing to be reminded that my classmates not only have opinions like to think, haha. Of course I objected at the beginning because not only do the Chinese (do others do this so much?) seem to have too common a tendency to assume that a word in Chinese (like 知识分子）is exactly equivalent to a word in English, but also "intellectual" is one of those words that has been overused, and lost its value in describing a real concept because it doesn't necessarily make people think about the concept behind it. But the discussion was very abstract and interesting, and got right about to the point where I want to stop arguing and go back and incorporate and remake my own opinion; if this point never arises, I consider the discussion to have been useless. Anyway.