[lit-ideas] boswell

  • From: "Adriano Palma" <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2012 09:43:05 +0200

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** Reply Requested by 6/24/2012 (Sunday) **


ain't Warner, 
it is Palmer & Williams, you have it in a wonderful rendition by the Boswell 
sisters
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=ltUzHJJ3aAo
>>> <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> 24/06/2012 04:01 AM >>>
My last post today! Good night!

In a  message dated 6/23/2012 9:33:13 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, 
rpaul@xxxxxxxx  writes:
Maybe you could put
1. Horses run swiftly.
so
2. Horses  run.
into "symbols"
or
'Every boy loves some girl.'
Robert  Paul,
The Anti-Grice  

----

Paul is right.

Of course, McEvoy will (or would or should or shall) mention that, for  
Witters, 'but' is a symbol. So that

"If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying"

becomes too profound for Witters to deal with.

-----

Note that Grice wittily avoids what 'it' is -- but we know from Cole Porter 
that "it" usually means -- something that you can't put into symbols: 
"Let's do  _it_".

Paul proposes that Grice puts in symbols:

Horses run swifty
---- Therefore, horses run.

Another example that Grice adored (in "Actions and Events") is:

"The HMS Pinafore sank the Bismark"
----- Therefore, the HMS Pinafore sank.

----- Grice would say that 'sink' is a misnomer. It sometimes means,  
"drown" (or go under water). But sometimes, confusingly, it means: for x, to  
make _y_ go under water. In old English, there wasn't a confusion, since they  
used "sink" for the intransitive, and "senk" for the transitive.

-----

"Every boy loves some girl"

is the other example Paul suggests that Grice put in symbols. In this  
connection, my favourite has to be Warner's in his note in Grice, "Aspects of  
Reason":

Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don't want nobody but me.

Warner concludes: "I am my baby".

Recently, T. Hart was saying something about V. Caley's "implicature" (the  
obscure word that Hart uses).

Caley was saying that for years she hadn't read one book her friends were  
reading.

I would take that, inappropriately, as a HYPERBOLE. People seem to use  
hyperboles all the time. In "Logic and Conversation" Grice gives one example of 
MEIOSIS -- the opposite of 'hyperbole':

"of a man known to have broken all the furniture: "He was a little  
intoxicated"".

For HYPERBOLE, Grice's example resembles R. Paul's

Every boy loves some girl.

Grice's example:

Every nice girl loves a sailor.

----

Grice notes that the problem here is with what he calls

"the altogether boy"

and 

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