Let's look at the nouns of today-ness and try not to find too much misplaced confidence. What we will be trying to do instead is look for an objective and subjective before a crash by asking "How do we know if drunk driving is a subjective condition."
"The danger starts in the gap between the objective chemical reality in the blood stream - which can be tested for and read, a BAC of 0.08% - and the subjective, distorted confidence in the mind. Of course drunk driving, like racing car driving, or tank driving, is a subjective condition, it's a verb!"
"OK, calm down!"
If you told a medieval scholar in 1300 that your fear of the dark was "subjective," they would understand you to mean your fear was a hard, physically real, objective danger. If you told them a mountain was "objective," they would think you meant the mountain was merely an idea inside your head!
It wasn't until the late 18th and early 19th centuries that meaning in "Subjective" and "Objective" slowly pulled an absolute 180-degree flip because of a German and a couple of poets.
Blame Immanuel Kant for his insisting on brain structures as determining ways of thinking across the Western world, and in the Eglish Language you can look at a rosey cheeked Lake Poet, Unitarian and Anglican son of an Anglican Vicar, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a mixed up and groovy kid, a regular mod, who wrote the interminable "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a long tale about water and the murder of an Albatross that has tortured school boys for generations.
And here we all are, English Speaking Westerners, the year 2026, still stuck with meanings Kant and Coleridge hammered into our brain cells. So, tomorrow we enjoy a blissfully irony of returning to Plato to have a peep at his Ideal Forms and asking was he Pre or Post Coleridge.
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