you understood “goods” as meaning those, you wouldn’t be
able to follow that line about “so many goods... .” It
wouldn’t make any sense to you. Whereas if you’d
internalized the conventional meaning, you’d be able to
follow it perfectly. You’d have no trouble seeing the author’s
meaning and why it was funny.
Which shows that most people do acknowledge a
distinction. Otherwise we wouldn’t recognize the first sense
as jarring and reject it automatically, whereas we accept the
second—the one referring to wealth and the benefits of
celebrity and high living—as amusing and apropos.
Now go a step further. Ask yourself whether we should
accept as goods—and should value—the things we have to
think of to have the line make sense—the ones whose
abundance leaves their owner with “... no place to shit.”
- I am made up of substance and what animates it, and
neither one can ever stop existing, any more than it began to.
Every portion of me will be reassigned as another portion of
the world, and that in turn transformed into another. Ad
infinitum.
I was produced through one such transformation, and my
parents too, and so on back. Ad infinitum.
N.B.: Still holds good, even if the world goes through