[lit-ideas] Re: Prof Manners

David Ritchie wrote:

I am reminded today of a Jacques Brel song, "Les Bourgeois." When last I heard it sung, I was about the same age as the young rebels of the first verse and I laughed at the stuck-up old guys in the second verse. (For the words see http://www.emt.it/broca/broca77/ brel.html). And now here I am, forty nine years old, Herr Doktor Fullprofessor, thinking that some part of youth could do with a lesson in manners. 

At this point, further investigation was stymied by an unknown source
which announced 'You don't have permission to access /broca/broca77/ on
this server.'

Note the blow-softening contraction, intended to avoid the
confrontational 'you do not,' of bank managers, choir directors, and
search committees; But I digress. On to Professor Ritchie's difficulty.

Why do I think this today? Two proposals for talks, sent recently, resulted in two e-mails that I read today. One of these explained that the conference organizer wanted to keep the proposal, "on deck," and so he would get back to me in January. What could "on deck" mean? I know it's a baseball metaphor, but what could be the kind explanation? I can only think it means, "thank you, I'd like to keep your proposal in reserve, to be added if this or that circumstance occurs."

In this case, the conference organizer has not so much used a perfectly
familiar expression, borrowed from baseball (or from the Battle of
Jutland) in a way difficult to make out as she has become lost in the
cactus land of broken idioms and misshapen metaphors, where half-remembered expressions used on forgotten occasions rise out of
the shimmer of false oases to tempt the writer (or speaker) to adopt the view, criticized by Wittgenstein (he was speaking of one's ratification of one's own judgments) that whatever seems right, is right.

In baseball, to be on deck is to be the person who bats immediately after the batter now batting; but behind the person on deck waits the person in the hole. I cannot bring out fully the allusive richness of the latter expression, nor of the former, really; but one learned in Gricean implicature would explain effortlessly the polychrome meanings of both of them.

Where such a person is to be found, no one, apparently, knows.

Robert Paul
Reed College

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