---- By J. L. S.
----
I TELL YOU: Dengler can provoke me in the right ways! He has the right type of language for me. My cup of tea! In his comment to "Griceian Taxonomic" he writes:
Anarcho-verbalism (the really private
language argument)? That would be
when you hoot at the dictionaryof your own PNA/RNA/DNA. In the derivation of species that would be a stage in the dismemberment process of apoptosis.
Note the geniality of the metaphor: I gotta love "hoot at the dictionary". This is the exact idiom I am looking when I share with the club:
GRICE: I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says.
AUSTIN: And that's where you make your big mistake.
--- which Dengler was reminding us of in the first commentary to the other thread. Two things!
(a) I never knew what a hoot is. My American informant was not sure. He is not a Grice-ian! He suggested various collocations, but I failed to follow him. Not that it was crucial for me to know then. I see it's merely onomatopoetic. I first encountered the word as a 'laugh', or something. This is what Horn calls 'squatitive negation' (not 'meta-linguistic' negation): "he knows diddly". He cares a hoot. He doesn't care a hoot. Etc.
(b) 'the dictionary of my own PNA/RNA/DNA. The species...'
But while I LOVE the hoot of the dictionary, I would be careful with Tim W. here --. There are arguments pro the idea that
The DNA
is indeed a "code" and not just a pseudo-code (I owe this charmer of an idea to Kramer -- we have explored its uses in the OED elsewhere -- it's computerese and it applies exactly to his physical/logical distinction.
If the DNA is a code, we need to break the code. We need the Dictionary. The Meaner being God. God (or the Selfish Gene, or the Dawkins Delusion, I'm never sure) means this and that. The DNA is the code. It's hieroglyphical, so we de-cipher. We consult, we look up, the dictionary. If the species need to do that to _derive_, I'm not wondering! Or perhaps I am!
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What would be a pseudo-code? It would still be a code, even with that propendaged hyphen. What would be a pseudo-rule? What about a pseudo-A and a more faux -A? Then breaking that would be a "pseudo-crack-up." I guess that's what happened to the rest of Parmenides' poem.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ian Cargan Dengler that sometimes or oftentimes, 'pseudo-' can be misleading, and perhaps in this case it _is_. In any case, here the quotes from the OED:
ReplyDelete1953 Proc. IRE 41 1252/1
Problems are submitted to the computer expressed in pseudo code. An ‘interpretive’ routine then decodes the input
information and calls the subroutines into play as required.
1959 M. H. WRUBEL
Primer of Programming for Digital Computers ii. 24
Pseudo-codes are often easier
to learn than the machine language; only a single pseudo-code instruction
is needed to generate frequently used functions such as square root..and
log x.
1979 Personal Computer World Nov. 61/2
Some [programmers] use
pseudocode, a written problem definition language that looks like PL/I or Pascal.
1992 Dr. Dobb's Jrnl. Sept. 57/1
Example 4 shows the pseudocode for the key
routines in the garbage collector.
2001 Technol. Rev. Dec. 18/2
VoiceCode..makes programming by voice a lot simpler. Instead of having to dictate
tongue-twisting syntax, the programmer can use a simplified pseudocode.