Entry 438 — Fun with the Nullinguists
And just one more language note, since we are poets and poetry readers. . .
Unlike many academics, bureaucrats, or military officials, I don’t think it’s necessary to invent pompous, unpronounceable and superfluous synonyms for simple terms that already exist. At best it’s comic relief. At worst, well, see George Orwell. . . . About the only one of good old Bob’s prolific stream of coinages that strikes me as worth keeping is “burstnorm.” That actually does improve on the other available words, seems to me, and has the advantage of simplicity and poetic power.
–David Graham
Okay, David, tell me what’s wrong with “infraverbal poetry”
–Bob
A guess, “Bob” (& I didn’t even take any pills!) –
M: rigid, defensive tribal and national identities, ungiving hierarchical principles, concentrated authority, reflexive aggression in a repetition compulsion that overrides desires for peace …
–Amy King
Thanks, Amy. It’s good for my morale to know you can’t find anything of consequence wrong with my term.
But this may be a fate not worse than the memento mori of the progeny of Aristotelian logic which remain eternally fixed in delusions of universal absolutes and therefore empty of useful meaning. To wit, Wittgenstein’s remark, “But in fact all propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit nothing…”
–Amy King
Spoken like a true absolutist. Nothing to do with me, though, for I believe in maxilutism, the belief that while no absolutes exist (except in logic and mathematics, I now realize), many maxilutes, or understandings close enough to absolutely true to be treated as absolutes, do exist.
–Bob
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This kind of nullinguistics is not entirely worthless: when Professor Graham later said “misspelled poetry” was what “infraverbal poetry” should be called, it made me say why he was wrong: “‘Misspelled poetry’ clearly doesn’t work. For one thing it does not indicate whether the misspelling is intended or not. Another is that ‘misspelledly’ doesn’t work very well (I don’t think) as an adverb. Probably most important, there are many examples of infraverbal poems that have much more going on inside them than what most people would think of as misspellings–a letter on its side, for instance. Actually, some infraverbal words are correctly spelled. ‘Misspelling,’ for instance–which I just made up and is certainly not much of an infraverbal poem but is one.” I count the realization that infraverbal words can be correctly spelled a nice addition to my knowledge of them.