[lit-ideas] Re: High Expectations
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:17:41 EST
Geary went:
>:)
But yes.
"Remember when all we had to care about was nouns and verbs?"
This is a cartoon from The Daily Telegraph, or the Independent: one
troglodyte to the other in an outdoor fire next to cave. It's first page of
Penguin, _Grammar_ by pedantic grammarian F. D. Palmer.
But it's true!
I'm NO linguist! And I hate grammatical categories. The linguists cannot do
TWO steps without providing a taxonomy: parts of blooming orations my
bloom!
----- So it's NP and VP
Then they may go syntactic and say S O V. VS O and the impossibility
of a VV O S language, etc. Fiddlesticks!
Go Gricean anyday!
--- So for a closer commentary of Geary:
In a message dated 2/28/2010 10:45:12 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes:
man's discovery of language.
---- Exactly. Actually, I'm pleased that Irene says Loren is male. I
thought it was French for "Lauren". For FEMALE-made language see Dale Spender,
"Manmade Language". She notes: "While a woman CAN Say, "Yesterday I f-cked
Tim", the implicature on the whole is that 'to f-ck' is to rape.
----
Geary:
>How unsettling it must have been to those first few creatures who
realized that out of the swarm of sounds that surrounded them -- sounds that
they like all animals associated with various
"states of the moment": danger, prey, rain, etc. -- out of such sounding,
--- and f*rt. You forget the sound of f*rt. This gives the 'raspberry tart'
in Scots. "They gave him the raspberries", Marie Lloyd would say when
touring in Glasgow.
---
>they came to realize that with their ability to replicate sounds at
will, they
could reference other things by giving specific meanings to specific
sounds.
---
ODDLY, Jorge-Luis Borges is dead now. But in 1967 he was invited to Harvard
to deliver the Norton Eliot lectures. Nobody kept a copy. Five years ago,
a man (a Rumanian of course) was in the attic of Emerson Hall, and found a
tape. He played it and it was the SPIRIT of Borges. This Rumanian published
the thing -- with Harvard UP, This Craft of Verse (c) The fellows of
Harvard College.
In the lecture 4, Borges went:
THOOOO OOOOO OOOOOO RRRRNNNDDDDDD
--- He said that his FATHER, a Buenos Aires lawyer, was almost a Viking,
and had taught him that in England, THOR was the god of The THUUNNNNNNNDEEER.
Borges calls this the Thor-theory of language. You say THOOOORRRRR and you
say almost everything!
Geary:
>They discovered in the unfolding that with different sounds they could
>reference yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Elsewhere I have referred to Bridges' Dilemma. He was an Anglican
missionary who travelled to Buenos Aires. Since he saw so many Anglos and
Italians
down there, he soon got bored and ventured further south. Eventually, he
settled in Tierra-del-Fuego. The SPCK, Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge, was paying him well, but he needed a justifiable job. "I'll
translate the Gospel". Problem is,
Our Father...
He found that the natives of the Tierra-del-Fuego did not have a name for
'father'. He wrote back to SPCK and his contract was soon enough terminated.
----
Geary:
>How gradual, but how utterly
>disconcerting to the brightest among them this discovery must have been.
Words, like
>some magic stones, they used to break through the prison of the present
>moment of animal consciousness,
---- No such THING!
They are sphexishness personified. Man alone is antisphexishness.
As Hofstadter says,
"People wonder about consciousness. No such thing! Take a wasp. A wasp
will feel so confused if you move the cricket she just dosed. There's no way
out of that. She is BOUND to it. I call this 'sphexishness'. On the other
hand, if you want to know what CONSCIOUSNESS is, it's antisphexishness to
the highest degree!" -- LJK
Geary:
>and that's made all the difference in the
>world. Like the first tool makers, the first word makers chipped
themselves
>into a new kind of being.
--- But words _are_ tools. On the other hand, a penis is NOT a tool. I'm
taming a drone. A drone will live about 90 days, but this one I'm taming is
90 days already and he looks healthy enough. A normal drone will die when
f-cking the queen-bee: her v-gina is made in such a way that the drone's
prick gets cut. So a penis is NOT a tool. For they can cut your hammer, but
surely nobody should have the cheek to cut your prick like that.
Geary:
>And it is still that magic stone of sound chipping
>us into the invention of ourselves.
(c) J. L. Speranza
---- Invention of yourself???
You mean the (c) of yourself? Ha ha!
Anyway, Geary -- you see how kind I am providing fruitful, exhilarating,
semantic, and Sunday-night entertainment for you.
SO ---- TOMORROW
GO
TO
GRICECLUB.BLOGSPOT
and leave 34,982 messages or so. You can leave comments regardless. Since
you possibly misplaced the many invites I've been sending you, I'll send
another as I post this.
The idea is that you go to the blog, browse the TITLES of the entries, and
comment as is your wont.
Alternatively, you can go to search engine, and type "Geary" and you can
comment on the specifics blog posts I refer to you, or your brother.
Have fun!
J. L. S.
The Villa Speranza, etc.
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