[lit-ideas] Let's Not Be Beastly to the Hun
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:27:13 EDT
In a message dated 4/24/2009 5:16:52 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx writes:
The Web site David posted redirects from "Argies"
to "Argentina." Obviously they are not trucking in
what they perceive to be pejoratives.
----
I recently heard the Wykeham prof. of logic, Timothy Williamson, on
pejoratives. He is making so much fuss about them. For Williamson,
pejoratives,
or 'the semantics of derogation' as he calls it, is a Fregeanly interesting
one.
The concept (sense and reference) of, say, 'Hun' is:
citizen of German (or as Judy nicely has it, "someone thought to be a
German citizen"; most people don't care about things like official papers, and
a German is a German is a German even if he has a Paraguayan passport,
only).
So, where's the derogation. Where, "Hun" is actually then a mistransferred
epithet, since Attila was not really a German.
In any case, the point that interested Williamson was the 'colouring' (or
Farbung, to use Frege's term). It's all about the colouring, or the
implicature -- conventional one, rather than conversational in this case,
using
Grice's technical jargon, and not about either the _sense_ or the reference.
Cheers,
JLS
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