2013 — 26 October: Saturday
It seems to have been quite a busy morning, so far, and it's only 09:19. Still, at least I now have a bit more fresh food in the house and I've also solved a minor-league puzzle.1
Not much of a puzzle, I grant you :-)
The first act of felony...
... I encouraged Christa to commit on my behalf was nearly 40 years ago. She used the resources of Royal Holloway College to photocopy2 for me the article "Slips of the Tongue" by Victoria A Fromkin that appeared in the December 1973 issue of "Scientific American". I was, at the time, still interested in linguistics and what Chomsky had been up to back then. Speech errors offer us some clues to how speech is organised in the nervous system. It also helps explain why I found this article on Douglas Hofstadter so fascinating. Source and snippet:
He pulls one [notebook] down — it's from the late 1950s. It's full of speech errors. Ever since he was a teenager, he has captured some 10,000 examples of swapped syllables ("hypodeemic
nerdle"), malapropisms ("runs the gambit"), "malaphors" ("easy-go-lucky"), and so on, about half of them committed by Hofstadter himself...
For Hofstadter, they're clues. "Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious," he once wrote. "This is what makes vast collections
of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist,
collectively adding up to strong evidence for (and against) particular mechanisms." Correct speech isn't very interesting; it's like a well-executed magic trick — effective because it
obscures how it works. What Hofstadter is looking for is "a tip of the rabbit's ear ... a hint of a trap door."
What can one...
... make of this? It was one of the comments made in response to Simon Garfield's piece in the Grauniad pushing his own new book about letters, but is talking about the earlier collection of letters by Ted Hughes:
Bizarre excerpt from a letter to the American lawyer Victor Kovner:
"They call it 'investigative journalism'. Case recently of burglars raping a vicar's daughter — this touched the fantasy of my countrymen (the wild national dream of raping the Vicar's
daughter, of being the Vicar's daughter and getting raped by burglars, of being the Vicar and having your daughter raped by burglars, or being a Vicar and raping your daughter & blaming it on
burglars etc etc). It became a popular event, papers full of it for weeks. But it didn't achieve the ultimate touch of artistry, the apotheosis, the highest inspiration of our National soul,
till the journalists began to lower midget microphones through the vicarage letterboxes!"
I must have missed that story!
If all three major political parties in the UK support something, but it is still defeated by the UK's intelligence community, what does that say about who's really in charge? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. (Link.)
I disapprove — strongly — of the ideological fervour that seems to me to have driven so much privatisation of what used to be part of our State's infrastructure: trains, buses, water, gas, electricity, telephones. Why, I wonder, would Goldman Sachs and USB — advisers to the guvmint — decline to comment in the wake of this latest 'profitable' sell-off? (Link.)
I had begun to worry...
... about my missing Manhood! Happily, Mr Postie dropped it off, and it still has about 98% of its original dust jacket, too. Plus a pictorial "Ex Libris" bookplate that you can see by clicking the pic:
Fancier than my little labels!
Here's a tiny taste from the opening of "Egg in Road":
BOTH women saw the egg at precisely the same moment. Both stared as if in doubt whether it were a pebble, heads askew, clumsy-booted feet tapping, the one pausing in her march to the communal well with dinted bucket, the other swinging a dripping, seaweed-weighted basket undecidedly. Realization came to them in the same breath, and they cantered forward at almost equal speed, their red flannel skirts and rusty black shawls pocketing the wind so that they seemed to sail together like two privateers into collision.
Having re-discovered...
... the Winter Fuel Payment claim form that was buried under other, more recent, bumph I suppose I'd better fill it in and post it. After all, £200 must still be worth a few shillings, surely? That can be tomorrow's little job.