Paul Krugman once wrote,

"Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything."

For which John Maynard Keynes presaged Krugman's epiphany by noting,

"in the long run, we're all dead"

So I ask you, in the short run that is about here-long and about yay-wide, who owns IP rights to the universal commons of a 'run'. Environmentalists tend to be Mathusians in Dolly's cloning. Policy makers are mandated to prophet election to election. Religions offer you seat belts sans shock absorbers, while youthful protégé keep lining up at the cafeteria as if there's something new on the menu. And yet few seemed piqued to holistically queue the more fundamental habanero:

What defines a run?

To my way of thinking, the potential value to be added rests not just within reach of the question's plumb line, but through a complementary understanding of the pillars that actually hold the plumb's case. You see, personally I'm not a big fan of rhetoric, certainly not in any learned Athenian sense. But I do believe it's fair comment that we tend to joust more about the anatomy of the surface and the autonomy of its facade than we do about the very context of its unspoken rebar. Parse ca "no pun intended" must be a lie once its articulation is Anglicized. Nevertheless therein lies the robust power of communication - holding contradictions as being possible and concurrently real.

One of my favorite, for lack of a better word - real - world examples of this electric Kool-Aid litmus test is when glasses, half full, point to the changing use of the English language Itself as definitive evidence that The Empire, like everything else, is snowboarding on a slippery slope. These inertial circumspectors will circumnavigate a classic wavelength running roughshod between Shakespeare and Joyce as proof positive, plus or minus, of the Codification of The Royal Rules. PLEASE. It's as if there was a definitive point in the past, a UN-like conference held in Malta or Yalta, or some other Alta, where every league of English speaking nations sat down and constitutionally circumscribed:

"okay, now here's the rules, once-and-for-all-and-for-ever." Agreed? Agreed!

In any respect, forever rules are no more viable in language than they are in mathematics (but that's fodder for another blogger). Because there is something so fundamentally erroneous about pointing to 17th century English - using 20th century English that it should cramp your brain like an overdose on sugar flavored ice. Metaphorically I regress, because life can, yet if you still doubt my contradiction please check with your cheque’s OCR (nee Oxford or the more colonial Webster's), only be sure to use only the latest protocols without ever stopping to ask why. In the meantime the momentum of my pendulum's original plumage remains unfettered. Because its sheath is not founded upon superficial brand names, but one of generic and universal physics, namely in terms of direction. Thus, back to square root one:

What defines a run?

Ever notice that communication is like demographics, or as the demographer David K. Foot once wrote,

"Demographics explain about two-thirds of everything."

And while we've managed to solicit some rather heady barrister’s billable hours to quote, in case you didn't notice, the math itself doesn't work, or does it?

My point is that it is useful (if not something much much more valuable), to be willing AND able to 'objectively' agree to disagree. Once you start to believe that there is only one right framework of way, you've started to self-serve self-evident cerebral concrete. For which there is no more tangible example than in language: Who's to say that American English is more right or wrong than the Queen's English? (Who's to say the Queen's English is more right or wrong than the King's?). Will we even call English, 'English', in one hundred years? Ever notice that it's usually people who only speak one language who are most certain that there is one, and only one, right of way, so help them HeyZeus. I say if you are willingly and ably pouring linguistic concrete then your net present social value already has one metric foot in the grave. In the meantime, about here-long and about yay-wide, demographics is communication, in the medium known as a run, at least for the time being.