In a message dated 4/28/2015 4:28:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
am having to read all the secondary literature on Wittgenstein, including
in foreign languages I've yet to learn, to find the source for Robert
Paul's claim that he died in Oxford."
This is interesting because in a previous note, in a message dated
4/27/2015 1:58:40 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, _donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxx.uk_
(mailto:donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx) had written of Witters dying in Oxford:
"According to Wikipedia this is a howler: Wittgenstein died and was buried in
Cambridge."
Oxonian Witters would linguistically botanise:
"howler" was first used in 1832 to mean an "animal that howls" (there are a
few in the Oxford wilds). It was later used figuratively, but the figure
stuck, to mean, something like a glaring blunder, an amusing one. The
figurative use (not referring to the ANIMAL that howls) is first recorded in
1872.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines howler a 'fig.' as "something
'crying', 'clamant', or excessive; spec. a glaring blunder, esp. in an
examination, etc.".
The dictionary goes on to give the earliest usage example in 1872.
In his "Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English", Eric Partridge
writes:
"Literally, a howler is, as the form of the noun entails, something that
howls or cries for notice."
He adds in a footnote: "or perhaps by way of contracting howling blunder".
McCawley, in "Everyting you always wanted to know about semantics* *but
were afraid to ask", writes that
"a howler" is so called because it is "fit to make one howl with laughter."
Against the argument that the thing would thus be called merely 'howling',
instead of 'howler', McCawley goes on to say: "English ain't no logical
form to it". "On top, 'howler' does not SAY who is supposed to howl, only
IMPLICATES it."
The Yankee equivalent is a "boner" which has been figuratively used to mean
something like a howler in the titles of published collections of largely
schoolboy blunders since at least the 1930s.
The mathematician Hardy spoke of a howler, not as the animal but as, in
his words, "an error which leads innocently, but inappropriately, to a
correct result."
In this case, that Witters should possibly HAVE died in Oxford. He was
staying with Anscombe at Oxford, but then decided, "for some reason", Anscombe
adds, "to go to Cambridge". (The implicature being that had Witters
remained with Anscombe, he would have died in Oxford, and would have been
buried
in Oxford, but this is what D. K. Lewis refutes as 'too counterfactical to
please me'.
A howler (not the animal that howls) needs to be distinguished, as Willard
V. O. Quine does, from what he calls a veridical paradox. It would not be a
falsidical paradox, either, seeing that Witters did die somewhere.
In the short story by Eden Philpotts, "Doctor Dunston's Howler",
incidentally, the "howler" in question was not a non-human animal that howls,
or
even verbal; it was flogging the wrong person, with disastrous consequences
(Dunston thought that there was a right person to flog).
Apart from the problems of revealing the original errors once they have
been accepted, there is the problem of dealing with the supporting
rationalisations that arise in the course of time.
This is especial in the case of Witters, who claimed:
Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens.
i.e.
that "[D]eath is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death."
So he would be the wrong person to ask (under the circumstances).
And even if he were the RIGHT person, how would you?
Cheers,
Speranza
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