The Blather of the Blog

* * * * * By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.

* * * * * * * for The Grice Club, THIS BLOG.


IN HIS COMMENTARY (dated March 1, 2010 1:58 PM) to "Reading between the lines", Billy Blogbather said,

"What the hell?"

The implicature of this one always amused me. It was first implicated by Philo (not the Philo familiar to philosophers, and creator of the horseshoe of logical implication -- to wit, "⊃"; as in "Cogito ⊃ Sum". No, this is the Philo of the I-Loeb-Loeb. Philo said, in Latin,

quid infernum

sic in Latin, and the implicature stuck. As Revd Clark Greggson writes in "Adventures of a Pilgrim", vol. ii, ad 4, "Had he said, 'What the Heaven', we perhaps would not be still here".

Blogblather continues:

"I must have made a wrong turn
back there."

The metaphor here is pure. The irony of the equi-polence between the "must" (deontic 'must' of 'chance' or 'random') and the teological character of the adjective chosen ('wrong') makes you wonder

This CANNOT be "Hell" ("Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"

Blogblather:

"I came looking for God, that
in-principio-erat-verbum God,
who without language would not be."

The exegetical heterodoxy turned orthodoxy via the "Logos" -- or ΛΟΓΟΣ -- of the Grecians.

Blogblather:

"I was expecting thunder voices
rumbling across the sky but
all I find is quibbling over
accent marks and snickering
over otiosities. We are language,
embodied language, we are the God we seek,
we are the universe, the galaxy,
the quark, we are our only
reason for living."

The writing in the body comprises the 'reading-between-the-lines' metaphor. In this case, Blogblather aims at the Scriptural basis of 'em-bodied' [Greek, 'soma'] of the 'logos' or 'sign' -- but also 'grave':

Vide: "The problem of the Soul in Aristotle's De Anima:
www.socinian.org/aristotles_de_anima.html

"In Plato, the soul and the body are two
different realities. His catch-phrase:
"soma--sema" (the body a sepulchre)."

Billy Blogblather continues:

"I keep pushing outward, pressing
forward with my ignorance as a
kind of black light flashlight,
following my confusion to a new
awareness of our possibilities."

Oddly, 'flashlight' can retrieve the wrong implicature, is played in software. Judy Evans has elsewhere reported:

http://www.freelists.org/post/lit-ideas/Political-Schadenfreude,5
"I say “boggle”, it hears “ogle”. I say “what time is it?", it hears “times it”. I say “worthy”, it hears “warranty”. I say “flashlight”, it hears “fleshlight”".

Billy Blogblather goes on:

"Language is the Galaxy we ride,
racing ever outward at ever
increasing speed; I don't care
how U-speakers speak.
I'm busy creating God."

Gallaxy hapens to be a very good one: The Grecians ("Multiply gods beyond necessity") had Hera and Zeus and the milk from her mammary gland [gluktos].

http://www.udu.cas.cz/collegium/tintoretto.pdf:

Chaucer:

See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey,
For hit is whyt.
And Zeus placed his first-born sonne
By a mortal woman:
the infant Heracles, he.
And verily clumsilee, on the tittes
of his divine wyff Hera,
while she asleep was deep.
And the infant drank and drank
off her divine milk
and did thus immortal was. Byt Hera
woke up as breastfeeding the brat she were,
and then as realises she is
nursing an unknown infant, for it were not hers,
she pushes the baby away from her tittes,
whyle a jett of her white pure milk sprayed
the night sky, as it produced
the flow off the now faynted
band of light known as the Milky Wey
of the Galaxyë.
The House of Fame
vide J. M. Geary on Chaucer,
MA programme, Phil-Lit, Theoria, Lit-Ideas


J. L. S.

Appendix

Here by courtesy of

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000132.html

-------------------------------

------ The Maxims of Blog -----



I. Maxim of Enlightenment:



--- 1. Bring enlightenment.


--- 2. Wear shades.


* * * *


II. Maxim of Controversy:



--- 1. Be controversial. (Occasionally say what you are certain is true. It adds credibility.)


--- 2. Hint at that for which you have no evidence.


* * * *


III. Maxim of Digression:


Digress. (Especially (auto)biographically. Note that Gorky was born Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, and "Maxim" derives from his Father's name, the "-ovich" being a patronymic ending. Thus does one Maxim beget another. Hopefully, more on Russian and other naming conventions in a later log. And perhaps someone more literary or political than I will have something to say about "the father of Soviet literature and the founder of the doctrine of socialist realism," and the reason Nizhny Novgorod was for many years hard to find on a map. The Nizhny Novgorodites are still proud of Gorky as far as I can tell, but not enough to have their city bear his name. (Beaver, Utah is not named for me (or vice versa (note the embedded parenthetical - these are good)), but it is apparently the birthplace of Butch Cassidy, ne Robert LeRoy Parker. So why "Butch"? Well, he once worked as a butcher. His most famous partner in crime (aka Harry Longabaugh) was nom de guerred in a reverse Gorky manoever: as a young horse rustler the Kid spent two years in jail in Sundance, Wyoming. Not much going on in my name, except that Beaver is supposedly a case of very poor translation by English officials helping my ancestors anglicize their Polish family name, "Kaczka", which means "duck". David Duck.))


* * * *


IV. Maxim of Entropy:

-- 1. Hyperlink obscure expressions.

-- 2. Keep 'em guessing.

-- 3. Use acronyms.

-- 2. Maximize entropy. Stream consciousness. Order pizza.