[lit-ideas] Re: Vendleriana
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 05:07:40 +0000 (UTC)
McEvoy was referring to stuff.>
It's hard not to.
Suppose we want to turn 'things related to McEvoy into an adjective.>
Suppose we don't.
That would be:
McEvoyian.>
No. It could be. But it could also be McEvoyeque, McEvoyist etc.
So the above is slender grounds for JLS deploying the word "McEvoyiana", as he
goes on to do, in order to prove some point I guess.
DL
On Thursday, 13 August 2015, 4:31, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
McEvoy was referring to stuff.
Suppose we want to turn 'things related to McEvoy into an adjective. That
would be:
McEvoyian.
Suppose we now we want to use the Latin term for the neutral plural: stuff
related to McEvoy. That should be
McEvoyiana.
There were at least two Catos in Ancient Rome. If you mean Cato the censor,
his work is Catoniana. If you mean the Civil War hero, his work is ALSO
Catoniana (as in Vivaldi, Catone in Utica) so one has to be careful. These
two Catos were related.
In any case, Vendler was Hungarian, and there was a funny reference to
Hungarians in the New York Times recently.
Re “A Case for Why We’re Alone” (Out There, Aug. 4): The way I heard it at
the time was that in a discussion among physicists of the possibility of
extraterrestrial civilizations, in which almost everybody agreed that there
surely were such, Enrico Fermi simply said, “So where are they?” He meant
that if there were such, some of them should certainly be advanced enough
to have come here to visit. But we haven’t seen any such aliens. The story
then continues that the well-known Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard replied, “
They are all around us, called Hungarians!”
----
The implicature seems to relate to G. Mikes who, like Helen Vendler's
husband, Zeno Vendler, was also Hungarian.
Playing with Zeno Vendler's distinction between 'all' and 'every', Mikes
claimed, "Everybody is Hungarian".
"The simple truth is this: everybody is Hungarian."
"This is a basic and irrefutable theorum like that of Pythagoras."
"One day, I was explaining to my wife that I had just discovered that the
parents of Alfred Adler were Hungarian."
""So what?", she said."
"What do you mean, 'so what?'?"
"I mean: why SHOULDN'T THEY be Hungarian. If you think of it, everybody
is Hungarian."
"When my wife uttered her theorem I saw that, like Pythagoras's, it was
TRUE and IRREFUTABLE."
"The theorem is true at various planes."
Take for example London.
"London is a small Hungarian village."
"Everybody is Hungarian, and if he isn't, then his father or his
grandmother was."
Alexander Korda, Leo Amery, Leslie Howard, George Mikes, André Deutsch.
"Queen Mary wasn't a Hungarian, but when she received a Hungarian, she
was fond of telling him that two of her grandparents were."
Cheers,
Speranza
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