I was once discussing elsewhere with Donal McEvoy the idiocy of that best-seller's title, "Wittgenstein's Poker". Certainly it wasn't _his_, I protested. It belonged to the Moral Sciences Club, at King's, Cambridge.
McEvoy protested my protestation, "Surely possession is 98% of ownership". And I was convinced. Yet, I don't think Dionysios, who coined "possessive" was.
A lot of the grammatical pseudo-jargon is just full jargon. E.g. "possessive". Surely we don't possess things as he wanted us to possess them ("The best things in life, to you are just loaned, so tell me how you can lose what you never owned"). The fare of "genitive" is not any better. This arose from confusions with Greek "genos", type. What the genitive case, a sort of quasi-possessive in synthetic languages, has to do with 'genos' escapes me -- and possibly Grice.
Cheers,
JL
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It was the flourishing which was Wittgenstein's, but "Wittgenstein's flourishing of a poker" is too awful and we should applaud the abbreviation.
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Mmm. Yes. Makes sense. Oddly, no philosopher is clear as to what happened that infamous day. One only cared to recollect that Mrs. Braithwaite (Margaret Masterman) was, as was her wont, not wearing knickers. So that's another awful flourishing, and genitive, too, for you.
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