| from Knatz.com | Teaching / Scholarship / Glossary | 1999 02 08 |
Semantic Dictionary
Definitions, Daffynitions, Ironies, Wisecracks ...High seriousness mixes here with comedy.
Argument
It has long been my habit to use the word argument in its scholarly sense: thesis, or general point being made. That usage does not make me elsewhere avoid using the same "word" to mean "combat over an issue." But I worry about readers who won't make the distinction. (Why should I? Who but a sophisticated reader would be here?)
What's really nutty to the normal speaker of the natural language is to try to guess what computer programmers mean by the word: their use is conspicuously "artificial."Some people—always other people—twist the meanings of words,
especially during the course of an argument.
SI Hayakawa
Artist
one who is willing to undress in publicOnce you start undressing in public, as Thomas Wolf observed, You can't go home again.Good artist
one who undresses the public as well as himselfPop artist
one who dresses himself and the audience the way they want to be dressedselling as well as buying their vanitiesGreat artist
one who undresses the public and is somehow praised for itSupreme artist
one who makes the public strip without even being aware of itOf course opinion as to which artists are great, which supreme, changes from generation to generation, fashion to fashion.
The above couple of
jeux remind me of the observation I once heard that a minister is one we pay to be virtuous for us: at least to dress and comport himself virtuously.
I've made hay with that in my variations on jazz artists:
the jazz artist is one who dresses (and behaves) the way the public longs to dress but doesn't dareOf course my beloved jazz has been co-opted by that egregious rockIt wasn't so bad when it was just R&B: R&B was part of jazzNote: speaking of our paying jazz musicians to be drunks and junkies and to get syphilis in our stead, don't forget that jazz was originally whore house music. (Above all don't forget that whores was about all that Blacks were
allowed to be.) In fact, the etymology of jazz traces it to the West African crios of the age of expansion for
fuck.
Thus, jazz music was the music the white patrons of New Orleans whore houses fucked by.
I didn't know till Ken Burns' wonderful documentary that pianists like Jellyroll Morton had a peep hole into the whores' rooms so they could know when to crescendo, when to pianoroll.
You realize further of course that Jellyroll's very name means
pussy.
Man alive, how that cat used minor VI / diminished VI progressions! Minor IIs too.
Authority
There is no authority. Only evidence: evidence processed by theory, the theory tested by falsification.
Substituting the expert for the expertise seems to be an indelible characteristic of kleptocracy. A society which would chose reason as a survival tool must demote all human authority to "opinion: probably politically motivated."
Notice: and remember: Human authority has a poor record with regard to truth.
That includes human scientific authority. Science is our best chance. Therefore it's essential that scientists remember the ideal humility of their art. Science priests are the last thing we need.
Kleptocratic authority is incapable of understanding what is said to it, incapable even of imagining that it ought to understand. No: such "authority" is the teacher. Authority has no need to learn.
Dozens coming
Theology:
the kind of cosmology, older than science, where the imagination plays with unnatural causesCosmology:
what happens to theology after science buds and orthodoxy slips a bit
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