William's posting highlights something I know painfully well: When I write a word like 'occasion', the notions that arise in readers' minds can never replicate the exact notion I had in mind when I wrote it. So I should spend a few minutes in an effort to improve the chances that when I use 'occasion' it occasions a serviceably close notion in more readers.
As a noun, a rough "synonym" for 'occasion' (i.e. a sound that may occasion in readers a notion serviceably close to what I have in mind when I write 'occasion') might at first thought be 'chance', in the sense of 'opportunity' or 'hazard'. I'm sorry William felt he had to say to me, "Let's be honest." I aver I am being honest when I write things here, when, for example, I say It makes for confusion if we say a stable, unmoving rock is the "cause" of my broken toe. The rock was there for years and my toe was unbroken. I'm not asserting a right or wrong, but I do assert it makes for greater clarity in my thinking to say the "cause" of the breaking was my action, my ramming my foot against the rock. It would be muddled thinking in a court room for the bad guy to argue that it was the knife, not he, that slashed the victim's throat. So it seems to me reasonable to call the rock the "occasion" for my breaking my toe, but not the cause of it. (No flowers, please. In fact I never have broken my toe, though the "chance" I would has undoubtedly arisen many times.) I concede immediately there are people who, upon reading, 'occasion', will conjure notions of "cause"; and others who will say my usage seems to imply something can be "the occasion for" something even though nothing happens, and that's absurd; etc. They have a point. In truth, my fuzzy preference has been to use 'occasion' in association with events that have a "reasonable pos sibility" of happening. It's hard to think of a rock in the middle of Siberia as an "occasion" for my breaking a toe. So hereafter I think I'll always use 'occasion' not just a "chance" but as (more fuzziness) a "necessary condition". Perhaps I can help convey my thinking by addressing this old chestnut-problem: "If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, is there a sound?" There are two separate possible events alluded to here. One is a physical event in the world outside your skull -- vibrations in the physical air. The other is a mental event - the aural sensations, the hearing that occurs inside the skull. Call the vibrating air "noise", and only the aural sensation "sound". There's certainly "noise" when the tree falls, but no "sound" -- if there aren't any ears around to hear. Despite how frequently they do it, when people call air waves "sound waves", they're calling two different things the same, and puzzlement is sure to follow. Or, worse, no puzzlement: just oblivious confidence. (I know: what some people have in mind with 'noise' is "meaningless or irrelevant sound". My academic response is that ALL sound is inherently without "meaning". That was one of the points of the first installment of "Me-meanings" etc. #1) If there is a hearing apparatus around (a living creature or sound-recording instrument), the noise the falling tree causes IS the occasion for sound. But with no such apparatus around, the most I can comfortably say is that it WOULD BE the occasion. When the falling tree IS the occasion for sound, the sound in turn IS the occasion for the hearing. What notion the hearing of a word-sound then precipitates in the hearer's mind depends on his receiving and processing apparatus (his brain), and his retrievable inventory of memories, in particular of what ran through his mind when he heard the "word" before. So, the way I use the word 'occasion' entails that, when I write, if my inky scriptions have readers, each time one of those inky images is read, the reading results in all sorts of possible thoughts in the reader. And those thoughts, feelings, etc will vary from reader to reader because each reader's brain and memory-store is unique to him. For example, if I use a profanity, the profanity has no intrinsic me-meaning that it will occasion in every reader. When I was a kid, even 'damn' and 'hell' could occasion scandal in some of my elders - not because of anything intrinsic in those sounds but because of memories from their upbringing. Again, I concede that some will insist that a given word CAUSES disgust (or scandal or hilarity) in a hearer/reader. I want to argue that it is the hearer's brain and memory that contributes the disgust. A shepherd in the Andes will draw a blank when he hears the same word; it "means nothing" to him because he has no "history" with the sound, no memories of previous usage in his presence. I can't close without a cranky grumble about the insinuated comparability of my views to those of Roland Barthes's (THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR), and Michel Foucault's (WHAT IS AN AUTHOR). It has persistently struck me that, when those guys wrote, each line was either vacuously, tediously obvious, or wrong.
