Entry 577 — Random Thoughts about Linguistics
When some uses a word or phrase, he is expressing his belief that the world can be divided into all those things which the word or phrase represents (to him), and everything else. He is a dichotomist, or believer in either/or, but a sane one. If it can be shown that his word or phrase has no contraries, it is a nullword or phrase, entirely useless. As I often have shown, a person saying, “reality is an illusion,” the word, “reality,” is a null word (in his usage) unless he can tell us what is not an illusion. The word, “reality,” for the sane represents that which we are or can be aware of–as opposed to that which we cannot be aware of. A tree I and others can kick, and describe in reasonably similar terms is either real in comparison to a ten-mile-high, golden apple-bearing tree that only I can perceive, and which even I cannot kick, or it is illusionary in a way that is significantly different from the illusionariness of the golden apple-bearing tree, in which case it makes more sense to label it “real” than to label it “first-order illusionary.”
I can’t believe what I have just written hasn’t been known for centuries, yet I constantly read the opinion expressed that the material world, and/or time, doesn’t exist, or that everything is poetry, or music, or whatever. And Berkeley not too long ago said similarly idiotic things. I just read that Hume had similar beliefs, too, although I hope he didn’t.
After the recent attempt at New-Poetry to have me dragged off to court on charges of wilful expression of immoral thoughts, I came up with a new word: “togib”–for “bigot in reverse.” If, for example, a person agrees with the statement, “dogs are smarter than cats,” without having studied the matter for a reasonable length of time, the person is a bigot–even if he’s right. If the person disagrees with the statement without having studied the matter for a reasonable length of time, the person is a togib. A person is no bigot or tigob, even if wrong, for agreeing or disagreeing with the statement after having studied the matter for a reasonable length of time.
I hold that there is no psychological defect but stupidity. What others call immorality, if I agree it is a defect, is always for me some form of stupidity. True togibry is stupidity, for example. I yawn if you call me immoral; calling me stupid is another matter (although it still rarely makes me sputter longer than a minute or two–and much more often than sputtering, I laugh). The interesting thing is that I can use reason to defend myself against an accusation of stupidity. There’s no defense against an accusation of immorality but denial, which is why totalitarians nearly always attack ideas on the basis of what they subjectively perceive to be their immorality, not on their rationality. The clever ones call it something like “coded immorality” rather than outright immorality. That allows them to call just about anything immoral, or leaning reprehensibly that way.
The hyper-sensitive don’t want much: only a world in which they get to have any idea they disagree with labeled “offensive” and outlawed without further discussion.
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Sunday, 27 November 2011: Covered in yesterday’s entry, except that I had a nice half hour or so on the phone with Guy Beining. Just our usual shop talk.
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