[lit-ideas] Feel Like

In a message dated 6/22/2009 8:06:22 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx writes:

beautiful.
 
re: P. A. Stone's passage -- which I now re-read: 
 
"We walked hand-in-hand to a marina
close to our house (about half a  mile) to look at the ducks in the
lake in the early morning. It was the first  time I felt like "Dad" and
it had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the so-called  day."

----
Very good.
 
A frivolous Gricean note:
 
"feel like".
 
P. A. Stone does mean 'feel like 'Dad''.
 
But one wonders how much of that is idiomatic. Recall, "Bleach smells like  
bleach" (Million-Dollar Baby). 

I would think that A. Palma would say in  Italian it is
 
     sentirse un padre
     (or in Tuscany) sentirse un babbino
 
So the grammar of each language in a way has an effect on thoughts -- or is 
 it the other way, Geary?
 
"I felt like 'Dad'"
 
Consider
 
"I felt like a mother"
 
"I felt a mother"
 
"I felt Joan Rivers" (said by Joan Rivers)
 
"I felt like Joan Rivers" (said by Geary)
 
"I felt like Joan Rivers" (said by Joan Rivers).
 
Grice discussed Wittgenstein's idiocy,
 
   "A horse can look like a horse"
 
In Studies in the way of words (google books:
 
books.google.com/books?isbn=0674852710...

Grice writes:
 
"Wittgenstein observed that one does not see a knife and fork as a knife  
and fork. The idea behind this remark was not developed in the passage in 
which  it ..."
 
---- As Grice notes, Wittgenstein's observations (mis-observations, rather) 
 apply to 
 
'feel like'
 
P. A. Stone is a dad and he feels like 'dad'.
 
The implicature that if Geary feels like Joan Rivers, he is _not_ Joan  
Rivers is, er, misguided.
 
JL Speranza
   Good night --!




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