--- by JLS
----- for the GC
---- WE ARE EXAMINING WITH L. J. KRAMER the logic behind the prison-joke (of the fixed "Tractarian" book of jokes where 'reciting' the number gets the perlocutionary effect, "you laugh at this"). Indeed, I don't know the real ordering but it strikes me that for a very Biblical subject, "7!" can scare one. If understood as "You are violating Mandate No. 7". Grice once noted that while he is "C. of E." he has no idea what the "39 articles" are supposed to articulate (WoW:iii).
WE HAVE expanded with Kramer, this blog and elsewhere, on otiosities like
"Please!"
and
"Thankyou!"
These strike me as 59 and 83, respectively. The Gricean misses the mark -- but enjoying it -- while he goes for (i)
--- May it please you that you bring me some chocolate. How can it PLEASE the addressee? Either I am mistaken about the origin of this perfectly idiolectal idiocy (alla Aristotle, proprium, idiotes) or Italian 'prego' is just as ridiculous -- for "You're welcome" (92) vs. "You're VERY welcome, "92 + 1 = 93". Cfr. Grazie, though (Italian 59). "Merci" may be better but possibly hypocritical.
(ii) does not fare any better. To think that MOTHERS can get so heavy about this: "yes please", "no thank you". The 'thank you' is 83 -- it just means "tat" for the "tit". It cannot really be meant as the transcendental subject appreciating (to who? God?) the benevolence of the addressee. But it may. "Per favore" in Italian is perhaps MORE otiose, but one would expect that from Italians.
So I propose now
59 + 1 = for "yes please", i.e. 60
and
83 + 1 = for "no thank you", i.e. 84.
This gives us also
59 MINUS 1, i.e. 58, to mean, "yes, thank you"
and
83 minus 1, i.e. 82 to mean, "no, please".
"No no" as in No-No-Nannette is possibly 45. Etc.
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I have this impicapression of a debate between the Scotists on the applicability of numbers to God and the Abelardians who perhaps didn't like any existential existentialism. There could be a binary here for RNA chitchat, or just any number of sinful applications
ReplyDelete.7298
The old lady who was always a regular church member had finally talked her cousin, a very free spirit, into
joining the Church.
"Tell me, Reverend," the old lady asked, "Do you feel that my cousin will have her sins forgiven after all those years?"
"Yes I do. I'm positive of it. You must remember that the greater the number of sins, the greater the glory."
"Really, Reverend? Golly, I sure do wish I'd known that fifty years ago."
So it must have been for Victor Smith, the 19th century collector of French folktales, one listing the ingenious seductions of the devil told to him by Nannette Levesque, an old, illliterate woman concerning a human who in distress enters the devil's service performing any number of tasks like feeding the fires of hell. Nannette assured Smith "this is not a tale, it is really true. Pierre would not have told it if it were not true. It actually happened to him."
The Devil's Heater: On the "Contexts" of a Tale, by Marie-Louise Teneze and Brunhilde Biebuyck © 1983 Indiana Uni
Well, yes. It seems like a little thing: seven as the number of capital sins. So one wouldn't get anything HIGHER than 7 anway.
ReplyDeleteI once composed a verse that went along:
God
Jack and Jill
The Graces
The Square of Opposition
The Pentagon
The higher number on a dice
The sins
Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs
The number of planets
The decalogue.
i.e. each represents a number from which we get the series
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
-- I would not be surprised if Scotus (also called "Dunce" for a reason) was into numbers. Also Pythagoreans who would never eat beans (a number of them) on account of the flatus, or something.
---- Borges argued that God can NEVER be so wicked as to have creted Hell for eternal punishment. "No sin can be as great as to deserve it" (Borges, "The Duration of Hell", in Collected Non-Fictions).
The senses are five. The trinity in Nicaea was three. The phainomenon and the noumenon. The conversational cagegories for Grice are four.
Philosophers seem to have liked numbering things. Incidentally, my mother recently brought my attention to this newish book by U. Eco, "Le vertige de la list", a catalogue for a Louvre exhibit --, where he expands on this. How some people like an ordered taxonomy of things.
Borges even mentions the 24 natural signs of the natural numbers in "Library of Babel": the books of that library were NOT infinite: but very large -- they only comprised a finite combo of those 24 characters in some fixed format of a book. Odd, AND untrue.