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To: RightWhale

Leave it to a linguist to discover who coined a phrase.

The only way to demand and take credit for the origination of something that "everybody" is repeating is to say it often enough (and sometimes prefaced by "Like I always say..."

I've tried to get others to pick up my word of Zogbyism to little result.


68 posted on 06/04/2005 11:02:03 AM PDT by weegee (Re: immigration "Those Syrians are coming to Iraq to do the bombings that Iraqis won't do.")
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To: weegee

One thing about the language is that none of us invented it to begin with. We are dropped down into a flowing river of words and ideas at birth and try with various degrees of proficiency to swim. One time aeronautical engineer Wittgenstein comes along and says that anything that can be said can be said clearly, but that the truly fundamental things can't be said, even while saying that, and all the while designing things that fly successfully, while being the hero of the Positivists and hating them simultaneously. Another time French Algerian Jew Derrida comes along to mention that his Frenchness, his Algerianness, and his Jewishness were all denied at once so that he was nothing for a while even while he was definitely something. A point? None, really, except that words and ideas bob along in the river of language and we cling to one or another to try to keep afloat, to make sense of nonsense. Einstein, of course thought in pictures, which is just as well since he, as Goedel and Wittgenstein, thought that ultimately the fundamental truths, not to be confused with axioms, cannot be proved but are just there.


94 posted on 06/04/2005 11:22:58 AM PDT by RightWhale (It comes down to lack of private property rights)
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