josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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14 Jun '09 11:54:16 PM

'American Indians of more than one tribe apparently take social relationships very seriously, not something to be lightly entered into, and at the same time appreciate that absence may induce change. In any case, they may decline to extend introductions within incidentally formed encounters, refrain from assuming that co-participation in the same with demands or even permits the quick initiation of talk between non-acquainteds, engage in silent courtship, and, to the point here, avoid verbal display when first re-establishing easy contact with a loved-one after a long separation.'

14 Jun '09 04:51:44 PM

'resembling drummes, which beeing emptie within sound big without'

13 Jun '09 01:45:00 PM

'The papers had blank spots where articles were removed.'

12 Jun '09 07:35:25 PM

Goffmanian words: 'nice', 'student'.

12 Jun '09 06:16:39 PM

One sometimes feels that an example of Goffman's is inspired more by a movie than by natural observation: 'Individuals pushing clothes carts in wholesale business districts create something of the same problem [of systematically altered traffic conditions due to their inherent limitations on movement and traffic management] for themselves and the pedestrians around them'—but then, he seems to take care only to deploy this kind of example ampliatively or supplementally, as the conclusion of a systematic statement about the general phenomenon exemplified and earlier illustrated with natural, normal, typical cases.

12 Jun '09 06:10:33 PM

'I employ the term "our" but do so knowing that in regard to small behaviors the "our" cannot be conventionally or conveniently specified. I can with least lack of confidence make assertions about my "own" cultural group, but I do not know what to call this grouping, what its full span or distribution is, how far back it goes in time, nor how these dimensions might have to be changed, according to the particular bit of familiar behavior under question.'

12 Jun '09 12:26:42 PM

Music in Joyce, in advance of Bloomsday.

10 Jun '09 03:03:16 PM

Strange how little the moderns quote the people they can be taken to respond to.

10 Jun '09 03:02:35 PM

Like anyone else who rides the bus to and from work with the same passengers day after day, and boards at a time of day when, empty, the whole space is at their disposal, the women who ride the 5:55 a.m. 3B to Minneapolis every morning sit spread across all the seats in the front of the bus talking to each other in full voice, and continue on this way even once the passengers who are not part of their informal group gradually fill up the unoccupied space.