Archive for the ‘Language-Use’ Category
Entry 1745 — Denial
Saturday, March 7th, 2015
An “argument” far too often used in debates between the impassioned (I among them) is the assertion that one’s opponent is in denial. “Denial,” I suddenly am aware, belongs on my list of words killed by nullinguists. It has come to mean opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose. When used in what I’ll a “sweeper epithet” (for want of knowing what the common term for it is, and I’m sure there is one) like “Holocaust-Denial” (a name given to some group of people believing in something), it has become a synonym for opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose–or morally to express opposition to! Thus, when I describe those who reject Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to him as “Shakespeare-Deniers,” I am (insanely) taken to mean that those I’m describing are evil as well as necessarily wrong. Now, I do think them wrong, and even think they are mostly authoritarians, albeit benign ones, but I use the term to mean, simply, “those who deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.”
Or I would if not having the grain of fellow-feeling that I have, and therefore recognizing that small compromises with my love of maximally-accurate use of words due to the feelings of those not as able to become disinterested as I am may sometimes be wise. Hence, I nearly always call Shakespeare-Deniers the term they seem to prefer: “Anti-Stratfordians.” But I have now taken to call those that Anti-Stratfordians call “Stratfordians,” “Shakespeare-Affirmers.
(Note: now I have to add “disinterested” to be list of killed words, for I just checked the Internet to be sure it was the word I wanted here, and found that the Merriam Webster dictionary online did have that definition for it, but second to its definition as “uninterested!” Completely disgusting. Although, for all I know, my definition for it may be later than the stupid one; if so, it just means to me that it was improved, and I’m not against changing the language if the improvement is clearly for the better as here–since “disinterested” as “not interested” doesn’t do the job any better than “uninterested,” and can be used for something else that needs a word like it, and will work in that usage more sharply without contamination by vestiges of a second, inferior meaning.)
Of course, to get back to the word my main topic, “denial,” means the act of denial, and indicates only opposition, not anything about the intellectual validity or moral correctness of it. Except in the pre-science of psychology where it means, “An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings.” I accept such a mechanism, but would prefer a better term be used for it. For me it is a probably invariable component of a rigidniplex. Hey, I already have a name for it: “uncontradictability.”
No, not quite. It seems to me it is a mechanism automatically called into action against certain kinds of contradiction: facts that contradict the core-axiom of a rigidniplex, directly or, more likely, eventually. Maybe “rigdenial,” (RIHJ deh ny ul)? For now, at any rate. Meaning; rigidnikal denial of something (usually a fact or the validity of an argument) due entirely to its threatening, or being perceived as a threat to) one’s rigidniplex, not its validity (although it could be true!).
When I began this entry, I planned just to list some of the kinds of what I’m now calling “rigdenial” there are, preparatory to (much later, and somewhere else) describing how it works according to knowlecular psychology. I seem to have gotten carried away, and not due to one of the opium or caffeine pills I sometimes take. I’ve gotten to my list now, though. It is inspired by my bounce&flump with Paul Crowley, who sometimes seems nothing but a rigdenier.
Kinds of Rigdenial
1. The denied matter is a lie.
2. The denied matter is the result of the brainwashing the person attacking the rigidnik with it was exposed to in his home or school
3. The denied matter is insincere–that is, the person attacking the rigidnik with it is only pretending to believe it because the cultural establishment he is a part of would take his job away from him, or do something dire to him like call him names, if he revealed his true beliefs.
4. The denied matter lacks evidentiary support (and will, no matter how many attempts are made to demonstrate such support: e.g., Shakespeare’s name is on a title-page? Not good enough, his place of residence or birth must be there, too. If it were, then some evidence that that person who put it there actually knew Shakespeare personally is required. If evidence of that were available, then court documents verifying it signed by a certain number of witnesses would be required. Eventually evidence that it could not all be part of some incredible conspiracy may be required.
5. The denied matter has been provided by people with a vested interest in the rigidnik’s beliefs being invalidated.
6. The denied matter is obvious lunacy, like a belief in Santa Claus.
7. The rigidnik has already disproved the denied matter.
8. The person advancing the denied matter lacks the qualifications to do so.
9. The rigidnik, as an authority in the relevant field finds the denied matter irrelevant.
10. The rigidnik interprets the meaning of the words in a denied text in such a way as to reverse their apparent meaning. (a form of wishlexia, or taking a text to mean what you want it to rather than which it says)
11. One form of rignial (as I now want to call it) is simple change-of-subject, or evasion.
12. Others.
I got tired. Some of the above are repetitious, some don’t belong, others have other defects. Almost all of them are also examples of illogic. But the list is just a start. I’ll add more items to it when next facing Paul–who has a long rejoinder to the post I just had here.
Entry 1686 — Of Mine Lingual Snobbery
Thursday, January 8th, 2015
Language Note: As some of you know, I’ve long expressed dismay at the way our language is being regimented: for example, it’s less and less dive/dove, or weave/wove, or light/lit, etc., but dive/dived; weave/weaved and light/lighted. But the other day I noticed the use of “drug” as the past of “drag” and was bothered by it. Consequently, I became bothered by my inconsistency, and recalled that I don’t like “brung” as the past of bring, either–although “thunk” as the past of “think” sounds fine to me! Basically, however, I am a language snob: I applaud middle-class but not lower-class variety of tenses.
Wait, I can excuse my dislike of “brung” because it replaces “brought,” not “bringed.” Similarly, “thunk,” is a superfluous variation since “think” already regularizes to “thought.”
I think the worst regularization is the one making the past tense of “wreak” “wreaked.” “Wrought” is such a wonder word, and carries so much of our past with it.
* * *
I wonder why the verb, “to be,” is so unregular. Is it our most irregular verb? Why not “to is”: I is, you is, he is, they is, and I issed, you issed, he issed, they issed? “To do,” a second verb I’d call central to the language, is not quite as interesting, but one of the verbs whose forms are twice-varied that I can think of, off-hand. Swim, swam, swum. There are probably a lot. Sing, sang, sung. Go, goes, gone.
* * *
I had another tiring day: a (losing) senior men’s league match in the morning, two hours in a dental chair in the afternoon, followed by marketing. So what I has brung you so far be it for today. Tomorrow six thousand words on why there is no “fromday.” (Just kidding.)
.
Entry 1276 — Marriage, Morriage & Mirrorge
Thursday, November 21st, 2013
More coinages today, these socio-political, I’m afraid. Worse, they have to do with perhaps my most unpopular political view, although it’s actually linguistic, not political: that only the union (preferably for life) of a male and a female should be called a “marriage.” Not because I’m homophobic (although I do consider homosexuality a defect like my own bald-headedness, and other defects of the kind that no one is lucky enough entirely to avoid) but because of my philosophy of lexicography.
Actually, I don’t mean lexicography, but don’t know the term for one who defines words. Lexicographers do this, but much else. I need a specific term. On the internet, I found “orismology,” in the title of an article whose author called it “defining words,” but my dictionary defines it as defining scientific terms, and a further search of the Internet agrees with this definition. So, I now have a term that’s too specific.
But that’s great! Now I’m free to make up my own word! “Definer?” “Meaningwright?” That’s classier. I’ll use it, for now. No, I won’t. I can’t think of what the craft of “meaningwrighting” w0uld be called. No matter, I just thought of a better term: “definitionsetter.” Definitionsetting is what he does. So, now not to my philosophy of lexicography, but to my philosophy of definitionsetting, as to why I’m against calling the life-long union of two males or two females a “marriage.”
One rule I go by as a definitionsetter is simple: to allow a word strictly to mean one specific significant thing only, the goal being to define it in such a way as to be able to use it to distinguish a given thing as fully as possible from everything it is not. Am I against generalities? Only those that fail to distinguish one set of like things from a second that is significantly different from it.
Perhaps I should have begun with primary words–I’m sure there’s some name for them in formal linguistics, and that I should know it. But this is a rough draft and I don’t feel like hunting it up. What I mean by such words is words that have only one meaning.
On second thought, maybe there is no term for such words because there are no such words. That is, it may be that there is no thing that cannot be broken down into subthings. But there are words for what most people would consider specific things–my friend Marty’s Jaguar, for instance–and words most people would consider generalities, like “automobiles.”
I think the point I’m bumbling toward is really that we need to break generalities down to a reasonable specific–make the generality a generality-word denotes maximally specific.
I think what I’ve for years been trying to do as a definitionsetter with the term, “visual poetry,” will help show what I mean. It ought not mean artworks significantly consisting of both meaningful graphics and meaningful words (semantically-meaningful words) AND artworks significantly consisting of meaningful graphics and textual matter that is not semantically meaningful but no semantically meaningful words because the two kinds of artworks are significantly different in kind–in a way almost anyone can objectively perceive.
My reason for opposing the definition of marriage for both the union of a male and a female and the union of two people of the same biological sex is exactly the same: I’m against using one word for two extremely different ways, however also related they may be in some ways.
I’m fading, so will close now. More on this tomorrow.
.
Entry 1275 — “Anthrofaction” Gets Siblings
Wednesday, November 20th, 2013
In yesterday’s entry of my blog, I wrote of ” . . . my latest coinage, ‘anthrofaction,’ a merging of ‘anthro’ (meaning related to human concerns) and ‘satisfaction.’” This, I went on to say, was “something art provides besides beauty. As it does ‘triumphance,’ or whatever I know I coined several years ago for the feeling of accomplishment winning gives healthy people.” Later I decided to call “triumphance,” or whatever else I may have called “that which causes sagaceptual pleasure, “triumphaction,” (TRI uhm fahk shuhn).”
Upon still further reflection, motivated in no small part by my continuing desire to refine the meaning of “beauty”–reduce it to its smallest essence, to be specific–I separated the “verosophical pleasure (that is) the result of the perception of some abstract pattern’s underlying a solution to a verosophical question (of any size)” from the verosophical pleasure resulting from “the recognition that the solution is right,” and called that which causes the latter, “perceptifaction” (for “a satisfying [intellectual as opposed to sensual] perception), which, I went on to ordain, was not a kind of beauty.
ERROR NOTIFICATION (because I’m too lazy to go back and revise what I said yesterday and so far today, and because posterity will be delighted to see how I went wrong but then corrected myself): I’ve been confusing my different kinds of pleasure with the stimuli that cause them. What follows ought to get things right.
At this point I have two kinds of beauty: concrete sensual beauty that all effective works of art have but no verosophical works do (to any significant degree), and abstract asensual beauty (symmetry, elegance, mathematical patterning, and other attributes that are not primary attributes like color and shape but secondary relationships that, frankly I haven’t pinned down very well yet but which seem intuitively to me to be different in kind from the color of the sky or song of birds).
Abstract Beauty causes a reducticeptual pleasure I am now (tentatively, because I almost always hope I or someone else will eventually improve my initial coinages) . . . Oops, don’t think I have a term for it! So, I have a lexicuum to come back to, if I can. Another’s coming up.
Concrete Beauty causes a fundaceptual pleasure without a name yet.
The recognition that one is–interestingly, I must now put it to get closer to my idea of this–in verosophical coherence (consonant?) with reality (yes, I need a better expression of this) causes perceptifaction. Its cause, I would now put it, is Verosophical Truth, if interesting enough.
That which seems to one to be (interestingly) right in one’s relationships with others, or oneself, causes anthrofaction.
A reasonably significant personal triumph, in real life or vicariously, causes triumphaction.
An effective artwork must express both abstract and concrete beauty, but can have one or more of the other three. Wait. I tentatively think an artwork can be effective without expressing abstract beauty, at least theoretically. I can’t think of any I’d say have.
An effective work of verosophy must cause perceptifaction but may or may not express abstract beauty, although it usually will. It will not express concrete beauty (to any significant degree).
Perceptifacton, anthrofaction and triumphaction are not kinds of beauty–although not necessarily inferior to beauty.
Abstract beauty is a secondary aim of both verosophy and art.
Have I gotten anywhere. I’m not sure–except that what needs amplification is clearer to me now.
.
Entry 607 — More from Spidertangle
Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
Later Vernon Frazer entered the discussion:
Thanks, John. I use “definitions” as a shorthand for conversational or descriptive purposes. As far as trying to work, I avoid the “prescriptions” suggested by definitions because they impose limits on my thinking and interfere with my working at my best. Without the work, nobody would have fodder for all the differing definitions. I’m flashing back to Wittgenstein and trying to define “game.”
ME: Sorry, Vernon, but I’m (obviously) not a Wittgenstein fan. Just because a few words are hard to define, at least for someone like Wittgenstein, doesn’t make the eternal struggle to define words (in order fully to understand what they denote) futile. As for the “prescriptiveness” of definitions, they are only prescriptive about how an artist can responsibly label his works, not—if he has a functioning brain—about how he can make them. I am annoyingly repetitious about stating this, because it seems to me the main misunderstanding artists have about criticism. (Which is dependent on what artists produce—but that is dependent on what prior artists have produced and, I believe, on what critics have said about it. A work of art ultimately is not merely what it is by itself, but that and what others have said about it. –Mr. Cantshuddup
Bobbi Lurie again:
wittgenstein fan or not–
what is this?
is this vispo or not?
http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2011/10/bobbi-lurie-ludwig-wittgenstein.html
ME: I like your image a lot, Bobbi, but I have to be sarcastic in answering your question: it’s a musical automobile, so a branch of chempo, not of vispo.
Nico was less sarcastic:
I wouldn’t tag it as such, no.
There are these websites you find when doing a search of visual poetry that pertain to photography, wedding shots, naturescapes, etc. They use visual poetry as a descriptive for hallmark type sentiment.
Your drawing of Ludwig is very much reminiscent of egon’s stuff,
ME: Same response here.
which I like quite a bit. It’s not vispo tho. My own filter for such things usually entails the existence of a focus on alphabet. That’s primary to me, but not all on this list. I giggle at your use of
Sophistication. I think we’re still in the process of hammering it down – the ongoing sixty year process. The inability to pluck a satisfying set of terms by now – one that’d satisfy most practitioners just spotlights the fact that this practice is separate to separate people. That means nothing gets answered or gets answered in myriad ways.
ME: At one point I spent some time trying to determine how I thought works concerned with the alphabet should fit into my taxonomy. I think I concluded that the alphabet is verbal—a peculiar sort of word meaning “these are the letters, in order.” However, with the works you’re speaking of, Nico, letters are the subject, not the alphabet, so for me they are textual designage.
NICO: Anyway, I did apologize for bringing this up.
ME: As opposed to leaving Spidertangle as a no-discussion zone?
Bobbi replied:
Thank you, Nico.
As I wrote to David, I really needed this description.
Yes. Sophistication meaning “I don’t know what these people are talking about. What is the secret?”
The fact that you’ve been struggling with terms….may I suggest you just say: “the alphabet must be included–this is in relationship to written language–the representation of something via language vs. via image” (clumsy this, i know, but that would have helped me in the several year search i’ve been on, asking vispo artists this question)
ME: Too bad you somehow missed me, your fellow Bobbi/Bobby, Bobbi. I’ve been cranking out the dogma that poetry has to have significant words for years, and that it’s silly to consider “visual poetry” not to be a form of poetry. Very few in the visiotextual field (but probably everyone in conventional poetry) agree with me, even though I have a fairly broad idea of what “words” are—I accept word-fragments, punctuation marks, any typographical symbol (like @), mathematical symbols and even the alphabet or some section of it long enough to identify it as an alphabet, as “words”—and don’t dispute that at the border between the verbal and the visual there are activities going on of value that may also qualify as visual poetry (since no definition can have a sharp border—unless it’s of something not in the real world like odd numbers). Seems to me an art should be defined first of all by what materials it explicitly uses in general (words or visual images, say), then by how it uses them, again in general (by pronouncing them or recording their sound, in one case; in the other, by recording their shape and color); a sub-art, like visual poetry, should be defined by what specific materials it uses and how, specifically, it uses them—words and visual images together by recording their sound, shapes and color. And so forth, finally to capture even the subbest of arts like Shakespearean sonnets or visiopoetic maple solitextual (i.e., solely textual) sculptures . . .
BOBBI to Nico: please do not apologize. i am so happy to read this–i didn’t know if i could legitimately send my art work to anyone other than Mark Young of Otoliths, who is tolerant with my experiments / does not define his journal in terms of vispo, unlike others here.
i will have to check closely on this, but from your definition, i’d say a lot of editors are letting a lot of things pass for vispo which isn’t vispo.
thank you, Nico.
ME: We need editors like Mark Young who publish art they like regardless of what it is, but it’d be nice if they could let what they want be known in precise language. Almost everyone in the otherstream publishes anything. Anyone who wants material of a specific kind has to carefully say so because “visual poetry” tends to mean anything. Not just works that are visual but not verbal, but works that are verbal and not visual. My press doesn’t get submissions anymore, but when it did, people would send me poetry about sunsets—hey, sunsets are visual!—and complain when I rejected it as not visual poetry, which my press was primarily looking to publish.
David Baratier was next up:
People who solely practice visual art or vispo
are verbose and vague
either due to lack of words in their art
or to leave open a potential name shift
to make themselves popular again.
Miro was before vispo, so he is a precursor.
From outside the gates it looks like the best known vizpoets
call themselves artists because vispo is an unknown term to them, or
a fringe term (as Karl pointed out, coming into being as an antithesis
to the concrete poetry movement rather than an art term). Vispo
also has movement qualities rather than just a name.
Ruscha, Jenny Holtzer, Robert Indiana and so on are artists.
.
ME: Ruscha, Holzer and Indiana are all, in some of their works, visual poets, regardless of how they see themselves. I haven’t seen anything by Miro that seems a visual poem to me, but a few paintings by Klee seem close to being visual poems. Stuart Davis made some, and so did Magritte. Picasso may have, too. I’ve shown these at my blog where I’ve also shown images from ARTnews,, which has something I consider a visual poem in almost every issue. Visual artists added typography naturally to their subject matter just as they added everything else previous visual artists disregarded, and the world was already set up to accommodate their work as visual art in galleries and museums, so they had no need to call it anything special. Poets becoming visual did, because their visual poetry was much more radical (because generally a good deal more verbal) than that of artists like Ruscha—and the venues for conventional poetry had, and are still having, trouble with it.
VERNON: I think the discussions—and Wittgenstein’s increased presence in them in more than one capacity—demonstrate what I was trying to get at. Nobody agrees on what vispo is, even when they look at the same work. If you worry too much about the definition, you won’t concentrate properly on what you’re doing. Some people say I’m a visual poet, some say I’m not. And I’m certainly not one all the time. But I might be one some of the time, depending on who’s forming the opinion. What I gather from today’s debate about definitions is: do the work and let the definitions fall where they may.
ME: As I’ve already said, poets shouldn’t care. For critics or people trying to work out a reasonable poetics, it’s a different story. Unfortunately, too many in these two cultures see those in the one they aren’t in as enemies or fools.
No doubt there will be more.
Diary Entry
Tuesday, 27 December 2011, 5 P.M. I only played tennis for about an hour this morning, but got tired. Went to Mcdonald’s for a sausage and egg sandwich. Got a little marketing done at the Winn Dixie near the McDonald’s, then got a nap of maybe fifteen minutes in. After that, I spent a lot of time in the Internet discussion I made the subject of the day’s blog entry, which I just made the last corrections to, at least for now. I guess I contributed over a thousand words to it, some of them insightful and/or interesting. So I can’t consider myself totally out of it. I feel the discussion itself will interest, or should interest, scholars later in the century, if only for what it reveals of one group of creative artists yakking with/at each other. I’ve done no Work of Consequence, though. I am now going to work up a hand-out for my exhibition, then probably take the rest of the day off.
.
Entry 485 — Another Politically-Incorrect Thought
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
It seems to me the word, “marriage,” should be reserved to describe better things than a man and a mirror.
(Note: a world without homosexuals would be a hundred times less worth living in than the present one.)
Entry 361 — Attitudes toward the Language
Friday, January 28th, 2011
The imbecile wants words to be meaningless so that everyone else will be as incapable of achieving understanding as he is.
The philogusher (lover of gush) wants words to mean just about anything so he can babble away to his heart’s content on any subject without worrying that others will try to get him to make sense.
The propagandist wants words to be ill-defined, if defined at all, so he can more readily use them to persuade people to do his bidding, by campaigning for political office in part by advocating support for “freedom of speech,” for instance, but meaning “freedom to say what is permitted.”
The aesthlinguist wants words to be defined by the masses because of his love for the beautifully polysemic confusion engendered by the language which the passive surrender of the definitional process to those least capable of making it an effective aid in the search for large understandings results in.
The verosopher wants words to be defined with maximal-accuracy (recognizing that they can’t be defined perfectly) so as to facilitate the discovery and communication of increasingly valid understandings of existence.
Four kinds of nullinguists, one kind of verosolinguist.