From George Fox' journal

"When the Lord sent me into the world he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to 'thee' and 'thou' all men and women, rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and down, I was not to bid people Good-morning, or Good-evening, neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and especially in priests and professors: for though 'thou' to a single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules; and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it: and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all into a rage."

In German, there is one word "you" for both plural and formal use "Sie" and another word "you" for singular and more informal use: "tu."

In English in the 17th century, if I understand correctly, "thou" was like "tu," it was the informal and singular use. The custom, though, was to call aristocrats "You" just as one would call a plural grouping "you."

Fox resisted this, as the above passgae indicates. He called all singulars by the terms "thou" or "thee," reserving "you" for the plural. So he didn't distinguish between aristocrats and peasants in terms of the form of address.

All are God' children, all are worthy of the same form of address.

Fight or Flight

Henry raised an interesting question in his comment yesterday.

Where does the phrase "on the lam" come from? I've seen it spelt "on the lamb," which raises humorous imagery of someone like Kobi Alexander saddling up a lamb for flight from the authorities.

The real origin is psychologically intriguing. The human mind seems to combine the verbiage of fight and of flight. Consider: I might "hit" my opponent, or I might "hit the road," before he shows up.

If I hit my opponent, that is also called a "beating." But if I'm the smaller and weaker of the parties involved, I might prefer to "beat it."

In Elizabethan times, it appears, the word "lam" meant "to hit." It came to mean "run away" in the same way that hit and beat acquired the above-mentioned extensions -- flight is dignified with fight language. In the case of "lam," though, the original aggressive meaning died away, leaving only the flight.

Except for the word "lambaste," meaning to criticize harshly. This, it seems, is a compound that includes the original significance of "lam."

"On the Lam" -- a neat idiom

A colleague, for whom English isn't the native tongue, asked me recently about American-English idioms for life as a fugitive.

The one that came to mind was "on the lam." It's an expression I first heard in high school, when I had a supporting role (one of the more-or-less anonymous baseball players) in a production of Those Damn Yankees.

Here's the plot: a middle-aged baseball fan who wants to help the Washington Senators makes a Faustian pact: He'll sell his soul for a great new outfielder for the Senators.

The devil, superbly named "Mr. Applegate," shows up and agrees. His way of effectuating the deal is to make Joe himself that new outfielder, giving him the body of a young ballplayer and making him the new star for the Senators for a season.

But Joe has heard stories like this, and he insists on an escape clause -- he can opt out of the contract on September 24, at midnight.

Of course as September 24 approaches, Applegate devises a plan to keep Joe -- now a sensation as the baseball season comes to an end -- from invoking that clause in time. Two plans, really. One involves the seductress Lola. The other: a scandal. Applegate persuades baseball's authorities that Joe is really "Shifty McCoy," a Mexican ballplayer who took bribes.

The Joe-might-be-McCoy scandal proves enough of a distraction that the 24th passes, and the escape clause has lapsed. Joe is apparently trapped in the contract for eternity. But ... Applegate has other fish to fry. He wants Joe to throw the final game of the season to the Yankees, losing them the pennant, crushing the hearts of Senator's fans, causing suicides etc.

He says that Joe Hardy the suspect ballplayer will suddenly disappear. The headlines will say Shifty McCoy "took it on the lam."

All ends happily. Joe refuses to go on the lam and shows up at the ballpark. Applegate magically turns him back into his pre-contract middle-aged self to be sure he won't be able to do the Senators any good. This also annuls the contract. Despite the creakiness of his restored non-youthful physique, Joe makes the crucial catch. The Senators beat 'those damn Yankees,' the fans are happy, and Joe has his soul back.

Anyway, that's where I first encountered the expression "on the lam." You can see it in a headline of today's Wall Street Journal, in a very different context.

What is language?

There's a fascinating essay (in a pdf) on the homepage of philosopher John Searle that concerns language.

Searle alleges that philosophers who have discussed language have failed to treat it naturalistically, i.e. as "a natural extension of non-linguistic biologic capacities."

The key philosophers of language, throughout the 20th century, were also students of formal and mathematical logic. Coming at language from a logicians' background necessarily yields different results than one would get coming at language from biology.

So Searle suggests the 21st century should take a new look.

"At one time, animals more or less like us, hominids, walked the earth without language. Now we have language. What happened in between?"

Even those pre-language hominids must have had a lot of the cognitive categories by which we navigate the world -- space, time, causation, agency, object -- though in speaking of what they had Searle deliberately uses the term "category" rather than "concept."

A dog has a category of space -- it recognizes that the squirrel is running across the lawn and getting further away from where the dog now is, whenever it gives chase to remedy the situation. So our pre-linguistic hominids had at least that much mental apparatus as well.

What don't dogs have? what didn't the early hominids have, exactly, by virtue of not having language? Searle's answer: the manipulable segmentation of the flow of experience: the segmentation reflected in periods and capital letters, or in the analogous inflections and pauses of speech.

"So the situation we are in when we move from experience to language is analogous to the situation when we move from a movie to a series of still pictures."

Instead of just watching the movie of our life, we can study it frame by frame.

I am simplifying Searle's article of course, but it seems to me that "the manipulable segmentation of experience" is his answer to the question "what is language." On a related point, he holds that semantics and syntax are in principle distinguishable, that cries like "Danger!" amongst hominids would have been steps toward language, though only small ones. Semantics without syntax.

Birthdays today

February 7 appears to be a good day for literary birthdays. Sir Thomas More (remembered for much else, but for writing Utopia surely) was born on this day. So was Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, and Gay Talese.

But the most intriguing literary birthday I could find for this date is that of James Murray, editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary.

A birthday toast to Mr. Murray! What a marvellous creation is the OED. Anyone with even a single bookwormish molecule in his body (and I'll confess to more than one) can get lost in the OED for hours, discovering the unexpected manifolds of meaning in even the most common and humdrum-seeming of works, and discovering that every thread of meaning of every word has its own history.

Work on what would eventually become known as the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857. The first edition finally appeared in 1927. And not a moment of those seventy years went to waste, either.

The story of the first OED is told, with panache, by Simon Winchester in The Professor and the Madman (1998). Mr. Murray is the professor of Winchester's title.

For more, start here:Amazon's entry.

A toast, then, to Professor Murray. You and all your collaborators have made the world a better place.

Reality

Let's ask that everlasting favorite question: what is reality?

We must begin any chain of thought somewhere, and since the question itself presumes that "reality" is our goal, not our premise, we can't start there.

So let's begin with what is sometimes taken to be its antonym, "appearance."

I submit that although there is a sense in which it is right to take appearance/reality as antonyms (and I'll get back to that) there is a broader sense in which our conception of reality has to be built up out of appearances.

Reality, broadly considered, has the following four constituents:

1)Everything that has ever appeared to anyone – whether the appearing has been long-lasting or fleeting, consequential or not – a wood stove keeping you warm or purple spots before your eyes indicating illness. Everything that has ever appeared to anyone has this much reality – it really has appeared! So we start with that. This is the "cogito" part of a famous formula.

2)Also, there are potential appearances. The noise the tree makes in the uninhabited forest. Of course, somebody might have been there. Somebody might be there the next time a tree falls. We ought to have a conception of reality broad enough to include such unrealized possibilities.

3)Invisible cosmic machinery. We postulate that various things must be happening or have happened in order to make sense of that which appears to us. After all, appearances are strikingly law-like and predictable. The sun appears to rise in the east every morning. We postulate the laws of gravity and inertia that make sense of this, and this machinery too is real.

4)Those to whom things appear. Conscious minds. Us. This is the "Sum" part of the formula.

So reality, I imagine you might say, has all of those constituents. But it is often used in a narrower sense, focused especially upon (3). This is what we mean when we say, “I’m not interested in the appearances, only in the underlying realities.” Some appearances are privileged because they fit nicely with one another into a coherent whole, and with the underlying cosmic machinery we postulate. Other appearances, like the strange sights I dreamy last night, or the purple spots that swim briefly before my eyes when I suffer from a fever, don’t have that privilege, and are “merely” appearances, nothing more.

We might also consider the English language term “realty” or “real estate.” Land and the buildings permanently affixed to it are more real than other forms of property, by common consent as suggested in the language used to describe them. Why is that?

Bloomsday 2007

I can knock one item off this year's resolutions (and my life's to-do list) with a good conscience. I've been to Dublin on Bloomsday.

James Joyce's great novel, Ulysses, traces the movements through Dublin on June 16, 1904 of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedelus, beginning with their respective breakfasts.

The breakfast arranged for this day by the James Joyce society in Dublin each year has become so popular that it is now conducted in three shifts, at 8, 9:30, and 11. I was in the second of those seatings, and it was packed. (By the way, I've learned that "nine half" is a concise Irish idiom for nine thirty.)

I was wandering about the neighborhood of the society's building in advance of my nine half appointment, and found the Eccles Street address where Leopold and Molly would have lived. There is a plaque there commemorating this fact, although aside from that it looks like an ordinary residential address, not diferent from the others stretching off to both sides of it. I would imagine the present inhabitants are content with the fact that strangers take photos of their stoop every June.

Nine half came about, and I had my morning feast. The components were an amalgam of the two distinct breakfasts in the book -- Leopold's and Stephen's. The kidney did in fact (as the text specifies) smell of urine. Actors moved about in appropriate costume speaking lines from the novel and interacting a bit with the audience.

I didn't participate in the afternoon scheduled events, because I preferred to do some of my own Homeric wandering about the city. I was back, though, at the JJ centre for a theatrical performance about the life of Joyce and the love of his life, called Himself and Nora.

After a successful California run, Himself and Nora is poised for an opening in the west end of London next year. The performance in Dublin on Bloomsday itself, in a more intimate setting, wasn't a full production but a concert performance by three principals -- the composer/lyricist, and the actor and actress who'll be playing the leads in London. Composer Jonathan Brielle introduced the two stars and read spoken dialog for the other characters in the play, as necessary to set up their songs.

Here's a URL for a review of the play in its California ru, although you'll have to scroll down past another review to get to it.

http://www.jewishsightseeing.com/writers_directory/cynthia_citron/2005-04-12-grossinger_himself.htm

Quite incidentally, I learned that the name of the river that bissects Dublin into northern and southern halves should be pronounced to rhyme with jiffy, not so as to rhyme with "wifey"! I learned this during an amusing number in which Joyce is trying to teach English to Italians to learn his living while in his self-imposed exile, working on Ulysses.

Tonorrow, I'll try to give you, dear readers, the benefit of some of my other wanderings while in my short stay in this history-intoxicated city. On Thursday, I'll update you on current events in Ireland, at least as I gathered them from my reading of the local papers there. And on Friday, I'll have a bit more to say about Mr. Joyce.