Cheerskep is right. Rules could spread from demands by political power to create in a certain way, all the way to the fundamental artistic skills or religious rituals or specific ignorant or educated taste. Boris Shoshensky
---------- Original Message ---------- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Re: rules Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:29:21 EDT > I wrote: > THERE, LIKE, AIN'T A CHANCE IN HELLSVILLE THAT ANY TWO OF THE HALF DOZEN OR SO LISTERS WHO HAVE POSTED ON THIS 'RULES' THREAD HAVE IN MIND NOTIONS THAT ARE EVEN SERVICEABLY SIMILAR. Michael responded: > > My notions are serviceably similar, unless your notion of > "service ability" is different from mine. > Believe it, I did mull the ambiguity (i.e. someone might read it as my claiming no lister ever uses the word 'rules' with a notion in mind that is serviceably similar to the notion he's ever had before when he'd heard or said the word 'rules') but I thought the potential for confusion was too remote to justify the tedium I'd cause by an effort to clarify things). And I do know that Michael is pulling my lovely leg with that sortie. But I think Michael is being serious when he writes: "Cheerskep [is] seeking to impose order on the crowd of words before it's actually needed." And I disagree with him. As I read the postings on this 'rules' thread, I was confident I was detecting that each lister's notion of 'rules' was different from notions of any other lister. I had no confidence I could dependably describe those various notions. I had a dismaying sense of good intentions but of missed connections, of futility that, for expression, required a poet's mournful gift. So I shall beat Mr. Berg to it. Longfellow write: "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence." And Matthew Arnold wrote: "the world...Hath really neither light, Nor certitude...And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night." Thus I, a noble searcher for illumination, Gatsby-like did cry aloud in CAPITAL LETTERS, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," as I honored the Chinese proverb, "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." Like.
