And I'll be thinking unkind thoughts about you as I do go around you.

Yes.

Consider:

I'm driving in a crowded parking lot, looking for a spot to park my car. I see someone ahead of me getting into there car. I stop and wait for the person to vacate the space I want to take. There's room to pass and I wave to the person in the car behind me to drive past, and they do so. Have they "gone around" me?

***

My son comes home from kindergarten and tells me his friend has the chicken pox. Over the next couple weeks several kids in the same class also get chicken pox. Has the chicken pox "gone around" the class?

***

I host a party where I serve pulled pork and baked beans. Everyone helps themselves to the pork and the beans, but as the cook, I am too busy cooking and entertaining to make a plate. By the time I do so, all the beans are gone. Did the beans go around? What there had been enough for everyone? Would the beans have "gone around"?

***

At the end of the party, the last guest finally leaves. I watch them drive away down my long driveway and disappear from sight as the driveway curves gently to the left. Has my guest "gone around" the bend in the road?

***

"Gone around" has lots of contexts, and consequently lots of meanings.

I don't understand why you'd say this, unless you're just kidding around. jim gives a fine explanation of my reasoning following your post.

Care to explain?

lol... I have the guys here at work arguing about this.

win.

I agree with IM on the driver/passenger example. The frame of reference for a driver and passenger is the car. The driver is stationary next to the passenger for the entire time. He does not go around the passenger. It isn't until you leave the car and make the frame of reference a flag pole in the middle of the circle, and the car is a convertible, that you can see the circular motions of each.

Everything is moving, and the observed motions depend on where you are standing. The earth spins. The earth orbits the sun. The sun orbits the center of the galaxy. The galaxy is careening through the universe. Am I sitting stationary at my desk or am I traveling at thousands of miles an hour on a rock shooting through space?

When we talk about drivers and passengers, they are sitting still in a car. It's the car that is moving.

You know what? No.

You talk 'around' me, which is talking down to me. "Maybe you're as great as geometry as I am..." paraphrase crap.

If I said I could sort of understand how you would think otherwise, would you stop telling me I'm completely and utterly wrong?

Semantics. ffs. Overthink it and you'll have magic pigs flying out of your ass and to the moon, if you want.

see, to me, the paths are what matters. we do know, in fact, that the driver's circle contains the passengers. that's enough for me to feel that he does go around.

Oh yeah, but yesterday or the day before there was to be NO entertaining of thoughts of straight lines. Why, that was ludicrous for me to even bring it up. (Insert a bunch of smartypants questions to make me look stupid...which I've already admitted to...including the phrase 'care to elaborate?' for good measure.)

No. Lines are an entirely different matter. Today.

But you are only saying that because of the conversations we've been having up until this point. That's the context now.

If you cleansed your palate by going back in time to a year ago, and you were driving in your car around a traffic circle, would you really say that you circled your kid in the back seat passenger side? You would think the questioner is nuts, because of course your kid had been sitting back there the whole time. You didn't move in relation to each other.

Fine. fucking "no". no problem. *I* am not talking down to you, I am as respectful of you as I ever am. I'm not telling you you're completely and utterly wrong. That is not paraphrasing me, that is putting words in my mouth, wholesale.

For the record, I am not trying to persuade you to agree with my position. I am doing the opposite, I am asking you to persuade me. To show me the "truth" of your position. To explain to me why you're "right".

Maybe all your examples, even the crazy hunter one too, is missing an important and necessary qualifier "relative to ______". Absent that qualifier, each of us can use some relative center, some relative frame of reference, RELATIVE TO WHICH each of these objects are doing or not doing something or other. Precision in language is the only way to resolve questions like this.

Well, I can't do that. Everything had been been gone round and round, as far as I can see, and I can't add anything.

I'm no debate person. I cannot persuade you.

I'd agree with that, BigV.

once more, with feeling:

That should be the Cellar's new rick roll.