The most difficult thing to do in "art creating", is to keep the
personal
unique taste consistent in ones attempt. Children do it best.
mando
On Oct 17, 2008, at 12:15 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The list grows longer. After today's postings it's now:
gift
talent
aptitude
skill
capacity
craft
The question I was asking was, in effect, does any lister feel that
he could
prescribe different notions for each of these words?
(Notice: I claim only muddled thinking leads one to ask the
questions in the
form, "What IS talent?" "What IS craft?" etc. The very form of that
question
"reifies": It erroneously assumes it's not a question of language
usage ("This
is what I call 'craft' etc") but of what it "really is", and now
it's our job
to go discover what craft "really is".)
Would you say there's overlap (for you) in some of the notions?
Would you say
you use some of them synonymously, interchangeably? In a fairly
rigorous
philosophic discussion, it's wise to sacrifice the felicity of
avoiding
repetition
of the same word again and again. Banish one of any pair of
"synonymous"
words. Use the same word each time you want to occasion the same
notion in
your
reader.
(Forget the solemn declaration, "There are no synonyms!" Both within a
language and between languages there are plenty. I'm talking about
the same
person;
a given person would admit that in his native language there are
some pairs
of words he uses interchangeably. And despite Umberto Eco's denial,
a totally
bilingual person can often supply two words in different languages
that summon
up, for him, the same notion. E.g., if you asked Eco to "translate"
'cucchiaio' I'm certain he'd say without hesitation, "Spoon." To
"prove" his
point, Eco
said this: "No English word really explains what the German word,
'Sehnsucht', means. Neither nostalgia, nor yearning, neither
craving nor
wistfulness
really describes the full and exact meaning of the word.b It takes
a muddled
thinker to believe that because he can cite one word with no
synonym, there
must be
NO synonyms for ANY word.)
I have another posting in draft, to Luc, in which I say I infer he
uses the
word 'epistemic' synonymously with 'conscious', so I suggest he
banish the
unfamiliar academicians' coinage, 'epistemic'. (But then, say I,
Luc has some
troubles with his notion of "conscious" -- but that's another
posting.)
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