[lit-ideas] Re: Speranzisms
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 11:53:06 EST
>I was thinking, but then I stopped. Started Speranzifying instead. Easier
>done than said. I've seen people Speranzified and it ain't pretty.
--- This reminds me of Prokofieff's son. "My father composed _regular_
music, and *then* he prokofieffed it".
I used to collect Birrellisms -- after Birrell, statements starting with
"Life is ... a bowl of cherries". Etc. It's amazing, as Birrell observed, how
easy people think that "Life is..." is an apt way to start an epigram.
But seriously, there was this discussion online, as to the alleged
difference between linguistics and philosophy, which I buy.
Arnold Zwecky was complaining about a book called "Key Thinkers in
Linguistics", which included philosophers like Grice and Frege.
So we have Griceanisms, etc.
In linguistics, though, the idea is that they don't ascribe thoughts to
people in the way that philosophers do. For philosophers, "ataraxia" has no
sense
unless you ascribe it to some Grecian philosopher or other. There is no such
thing as _ataraxia_ itself. Same for *any* philosophical conception you can
think of (think, "banality of evil").
Whereas in linguistics it would be pretty vacuous (and they usually don't
have the classical formation for that) to search for who was the Roman author
who first used *sententia* to mean 'sentence' in Chomsky's sense of the word!
Middday Speranzism: "At noon, stop philosophizing and have a glass of milk"
Cheers,
JL
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