Epistemology II – The original idea for this comic came from my fascination with the terms epistemology, etymology, entomology, eschatology (ordered differently in the comic), particularly the sonorous and alliterative nature when consecutively listing off the widely different fields of study. This proliferated into fifty-eight different words for two reasons, to attempt a poetic arrangement of the various subjects and to demonstrate, partially through absurdity, the vast amount that is not known. For us, and not the Nihileafs, is the added irony that there is massive amounts of knowledge known collectively to humans in these areas, yet the average laymen knows almost nothing of them (myself included), though it is unlikely that even with a lifetime of effort a person could become an expert in more than one or two of these subjects. One additional epistemological limitation that Mungi has is knowledge is constrained by Mungi’s dual creators. What my co-creator and I don’t know, Mungi will never know. How’s that for epistemology? In fact, to create this list I had to use a wonderful trifecta of Google, Wikipedia, and a special word list focused on the suffix -ology found at the back of Roget’s A-Z Thesaurus. Many of the words were previously unknown to me, my knowledge of each subject is superficial at best, and I have even already forgotten what some of them mean. In creating the comic there were multiple challenges with trying to put everything in the ‘right’ order. The flow from word to word was primarily driven by relevance of subject, an alliterative match, letters throughout words that matched beyond -ology, or syllables that rhymed in addition -ology. In some cases none of these criteria were met and admittedly there are some parts that don’t quite flow. Another flaw is the disproportionate number of words overrepresenting some subjects, particularly the middle of the monologue relating the various classifications of organisms. Additionally some words represent subjects that are subsets of others, myrmecology is a branch of entomology and both are a branch of biology (though on the whole that is likely unavoidable in a list of this given length and linguistic goals). It is likely this comic can be improved on by rearranging the words, though there are more 2^78 permutations (factorial 58!), and I would like to think most would be significantly worse. To add complexity one can also add additional -ology words that were excluded (one’s that I had strongly considered, amongst a couple others, but didn’t were ‘morphology’, ‘psychology’, ‘physiology’, and ‘genecology’). An alternative to improvement would be to pay tribute by memorizing and verbally reciting the comic. For those who do undertake this arduous and useless task, I apologize for any weaknesses in crafting that limit verbal recitation (I personally get caught up from Hyetology-Potamology-Limnology and Conchology-Malacology-Acanthology-Ichthyology). There is almost assuredly a better version and, for epistemological reasons, we’ll likely never read it. – Zachary