On Oct 18, 2010, at 3:10 PM, [email protected] wrote: > NOTIONS THAT ARE EVEN SERVICEABLY SIMILAR.
Whew. My eyedrums are ringing after all those words in CAPITAL LETTERS! And to respond: my notions are serviceably similar, unless your notion of "service ability" is different from mine. There was this great WWII-era cartoon from the New Yorker (I think). It shows a theater crowd in Manhattan milling around trying to get into the lobby. On the sidewalk is an MP, who yells out, "All right, let's dress up this damn line." Everyone in the crowd is looking wide-eyed at him. The unruly and disordered crowd of words with "meanings" will squeeze through the doors of language in long strings called sentences. The words will dither for a short while around the concession stand of colloquial usage, but eventually they will file into the auditorium and find their seats, producing a relatively ordered audience, completing the playful relationship between the actors (who carry the content or 'meaning' of the play) and the audience (who listen, laugh or frown, and then clap when their mental "notions" conform to the play's content, which was produced from the playwright's notions). The MP on the sidewalk is Sgt. Cheerskep, seeking to impose order on the crowd of words before it's actually needed. <g> | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
