There's a word for that.

[fflo]

Maybe what I've got is a vocabulary problem.

I was just looking up "tautological" to see if it had any special meaning in mathematics, and thinking how learning words like that sometimes, with the "There's a name for that phenomenon" aspect, make meaning gel or crystalize or solidify or what-you-will. Meaning is only metaphors and assigned associations, after all. Oh, maybe it's more than that, and a logician or linguist or neuroscientist or psychologist could flesh out the subject for me nicely. But none of them are around at the moment, anyway. It's just me and the insufficiently strong coffee.

But learning the names for rhetorical devices, fer instance, can turn you on to when a rhetorical device is being used on your ass. You know?

I don't know what I'm talking about. It's not exactly what things mean that I can't get at; it's what I feel about them. Or is that the same thing? How can you think about anything at all, the way doing so at all thoroughly makes it one big swirling mess of nothing? Is it wiser not to think about anything much, or to think only a tiny bit, in a flip, cursory way, unless the problem at hand is something like how to build a suspension bridge or a better mousetrap or something so superbly grounded in the physical?

I am now ready to accept your awards for Most Vapid Entry On My Friends Page Today.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

It is what it is.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

*haw*

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

Or something to that effect.

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

Here's a pretty interesting article I found that touches on denotative vs. connotative meanings of words: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem06.html

I rather like the notion that there is no such thing as a synonym, since every word has a slightly different connotation from every other word, even if the denotative definitions are the same.

Basically, it gives me an excuse to use profanity that my mom can't argue with.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

tee-hee

That piece looks good. I'm gonna read it through soon. But tell me this: did Melanie say her phallic symbol thing in a song?

And that reminds me of the visiting poetry teacher in my old school system who, visiting my friend Arthur's class at Cross-Town High, supposedly wrote on the board one day the concept she'd be elucidating: "pathetic phallacy." Not that I doubt Arthur, exactly. But it was so funny, and I used to believe in "too funny to be true."

Which I also applied to the story of Neil Sedaka asking Mick Jagger at a party if he could kiss his fingers. I was absolutely certain that such a thing could never happen, in my 17 year-old wisdom. So much more likely that someone would make up an over-the-top tale.

For someone so ready to be lied to, you'd think I'd rarely miss it.

(Lord, I'm clearly in some drippy strange headspace today, trying to give a durn about Hitchin's foundational article on generalized Calabi-Yau manifolds... ---does that take you back?)

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

I was surprised by the Melanie thing too. I rather hope it was in a song! I'd like to know her for something other than "Brand New Key" and that horrible song she did with The 6ths.

See, I tend to go with "That's so funny I choose to believe it's real." Life is far more entertaining that way. :)

Dude, I cannot tell you how much I miss the Calabi-Yau manifolds. I really think MR should up and move to Bangor. Put the whole operation on a trailer while everyone is at work, and by the time the day's out... here you are! And there's nothing you can do about it except assimilate and also let me back in. Not that I had anything to do with the trailer showing up in the first place...

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I kinda like that plan, Willie. I'll see what I can do! Maybe we could also forget to mention where we'd gone to the overseers "home" office "parent" company holders of the pursestrings...

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

Hee! I can't top that. :)

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

A rocketeer friend of mine had heard the old "rockets are phallic" thing one to many times. His response: "anything that's longer than it is wide is phallic, and if it's wider than it is long, you're just holding it sideways."

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

But learning the names for rhetorical devices, fer instance, can turn you on to when a rhetorical device is being used on your ass. You know?

Straw man! Straw man! Everywhere in politics for as lomg as I've paid attention, even before I learned the term, I could apply it retroactively, it's been straw man, straw man, straw man. Yes. Back in the mid-1980's it was good to learn a term to hang what had been a growing pet peeve of mine.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. And what of the slippery slope?

[paperkingdoms]

I was talking with someone a while back about the sensation of losing one's words, or not being able to find words for things. And for as frustrating as that can be, we also talked about how sometimes finding words for things changes the things you've found words for - either because they drag all their associations along with them, or because the words aren't *quite* right, but you grab for them anyway, and deciding on those words changes the underlying Thing.

So... that's what this reminded me of. ;^)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Now you're reminding me of one of my motivations for studying sign---the hardest one to explain to most people, so I didn't usually bother. And one does think differently in sign language---I'm guessing it's more differently than how differently one thinks in another spoken language, at least if the other spoken language is Indo-European. But I don't really know, never having acquired a second spoken language.

The other thing I think of is how we aren't born thinking in words, and we make that transition. Or a transition into a good portion of a part/style of processing that happens in words. Being around very young people interrupts something, or deflates something, involving being accustomed to putting a lot of stock in verbiage.