[Newspoetry] [Peace] URGENT: Go on Record Supporting Urbana Anti-War ResolutionNow!! (fwd)

[Robert Porter]

Does this mean you support the resolution?   ∑:•]

On Tuesday, January 28, 2003, at 10:28 AM, Donald L Emerick wrote:

> Dear Anne,
>
> In the last of your proposed resolutions, you my have slipped up its 
> typing.
> Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense, while Powell is Secretary of State -- so
> I suspect your fingers did what mine do, sometimes, which is to leap from
> the start of one phrase to a similar point, in another phrase,
> inadvertently,
> in the meanwhile omitting all of the intervening words (end of phrase one,
> start of phrase two).
>
> Interestingly, I might note, I do not hear this same mistake in listening 
> to
> speakers speaking, but I do see it happens to writer's writing.  A similar
> kind of mistake made by speakers, though, would be those so-called
> slips of the tongue (ornately, lapsus linguae or lapsi linguae?).  A 
> similar
> mistake by play-back devices (variously, electro-mechanical) would be
> a skip between (adjacent) tracks (grooves) that often happens when a
> device is (physically) jarred?  (It would be hard to imagine a device as
> mentally jarred, in the same sense of jarring (for otherwise, the device 
> is,
> like, in a bottle, in a glass display jar or behind glass, in a display
> case,
> on which it says: DO NOT OPEN EXCEPT IN CASE OF FIRE).)
>
> However, slips of the finger (lapsus fingae?  lapsi digiti?) would appear
> to have no name, at least not one that I have been taught, despite the
> rather high frequency of the event (this kind of mistake).  So, I hereby
> propose a name, as if I am the first to discover, to cognition, this 
> effect,
> and thereby, as discoverer, entitled to propose a name for a naming,
> which name others shall respect, by using it when it is appropriate,
> to speak of the effect (phenomenon) when they think to mention it.
>
> The name of this effect?  That is problematic.  I am disposed,
> by my schooling (or lack of it, one is never sure whether to praise
> or to condemn some historical elements of a developmental path)
> to favor Latin, even pig-Latin, over all other languages.  (I thought
> only hog-farmers and hog-butchers to the world spoke pig-Latin,
> as related elsewhere, in the related tales of the Three Little Pigs
> and of a Pig crying Oui-Oui-Oui all the way home from market,
> whose French, I am sure, was a Romance language, aLa tin.)
>
> I try to exhibit, in displaying mental associations, how mnemory
> is laid down, rather like a heap, as an unplanned collection of
> trivia, there being little reason for thinking, abstractly, that all
> recollection comes from successfully realized intentions to collect
> experience, as it happens, into a mnemory.  Order that happens,
> most often, far more often than other ways, is an order of recall,
> not an order of experience -- and it is that discipline, of course,
> that tricksters like mnemonicists, rhymers and reasoners exploit,
> to make mnemory seem to have an order by the fact that it fakes
> an order for some display, afterwards.  (Science is the business
> of discovering fakes, leaving the peace of truth undisturbed as
> happens in its consequent identity for the truth of peace.)
>
> And writers, too, show this tricksterism works, by planning
> how words shall fall, in a certain order, to achieve some effects,
> although different kinds of structural levels are always possible,
> as one becomes skillfully advanced in one's abilities to form,
> reform, inform, conform, deform, x-form.  The plain and clear
> language of expression of the literal business world is, thus,
> a zero-level, normatively: when a literal (physical) expression
> is one-to-one with some parallel and unique mnental construct,
> such as its (originally-intended) mneaning.  (This would be
> called the charlantry ESP if we did not call its medium language.)
>
> Obviously, now, having faced the task at least more than once,
> and having fled more than once, as well, I do not wish to name
> this phenomenon.  I leave it to your imaginations, as unspoiled
> as they might naturally be, to fix a place, find a name, for this
> alleged experience.  Perhaps, if I were not such a lazy man,
> in service to a cowardly soul, (or do I have that backwards?),
> I would dare defy myself, my own mnemory, and make it up,
> make up my mnind, make up a word, and put it on for you.
>
> Thus, I have overwritten the pretextual occasion of this note,
> having no time that is not as free as I wish it to be, i-dle-dust.
> Thanks for listening,
> Donald L Emerick
>
> _______________________________________________
> Newspoetry maillist  -  Newspoetry at lists.groogroo.com
> http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/newspoetry
>