On Jun 27, 2009, at 3:16 PM, William Conger wrote:
a sense of something being "very different" would cause one to have
doubts about a fundamental premise or requirement the thing is
presumed to match or employ.
Regarding the itch, my first reaction is a feeling of repulsion
because I don't know you intimately enough to be your scratcher. If
you were a pretty girl I might oblige. Otherwise I'd tell you to go
find a doorway or a tree or get a tool of some sort if you need your
itch scratched and don't tell me anymore about it, please.
I was thinking of a woman scratching me, so you (and I) are off the
hook!
Also,I think the likening you describe is really a metaphor and not
a simple analogy because you are comparing a physical state with a
vague mental state, a transitive state at that.
You're throwing my suit out of court on a technicality?
So, with respect to the metaphor I'd guess that you are suggesting
that the author has an itch (vague feeling/idea) and tries varied
words and phrases to hopefully hone in on the most satisfying relief
that is the result of the feeling/idea being conveyed symbolically.
An ambiguity or second level metaphorical interpretation would be
that this process also mirrors a reader who, as an author surrogate,
repeats the process of the author.
My anecdote isn't about an author deciding on the best word to use.
Rather, a speaker says something. A listener responds in such a way
that the speaker infers that the listener didn't get it, that is, the
listener was scratching in the wrong place--close, perhaps, but not on
the spot. So they go back and forth a couple of times, trying out
slightly different words until the speaker is confident the listener
got it, or, as in my analogy, the impulse for the speaker to continue
to adjust the listener's response just dissipates.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/
