At 08:09 PM 00/01/23 , Damien Broderick wrote:
>...
>I should have reminded everyone that *my* odd (?) use of the phrase was
>just a direct, unaltered recycling of *Sasha's*. He had written:
>
> >(I like reminding people that out of millions of animal
> >species, humans are the only one who have any problem seeing
> >each other naked
>
>Now I assume that while Sasha is a Russian-American (right?) whose English
>usage therefore might be a bit skewed, Americans surely didn't suppose that
>he was saying that humans are plagued by a high frequency of nakedness, or
>hysterical blindness. He meant, as I meant, that (many/most) humans are
>*worried by it*. The difference was that Sasha took this worry to be
>neurotic; I was trying to situate it in a social context that made it more
>understandable/functional. E.g., we worry about people cheating on term
>papers (something few lions or ants get their knickers in a twist abt)
>(`knickers' are underpants), not just because we are obsessively anal types but because there's something at stake.
>
>Anyway, I'm blaming Sasha for all this. :)
>
>Damien
I consider myself not a Russian-American but an individual largely
liberated from cultural distinctions, and pride myself in using a
goodly Russianalized version of English. Not having the issues -
nor projecting the expectations - of an anal type, I don't have to
pay as much attention to keeping my linguistic knickers clean; that
can be rather expected from the recognized masters of the language
such as Damien, thus making any confusion in the discussion
unquestionably *their* fault.
As an exception, I would graciously descend to the truly anal style:
The general point still is that while cheating on the term papers is
analogous to a failure in systemic inheritance in pre-human stages
in both nature and consequences, resulting in a major pain in the butt
for the subject that botched the learning process, with punishment
delivered by a watchful professor or a still more unforgiving predator,
in an act that in the human society is much more mild, caring, and better
articulated than in cruel Nature, my modest attempt to thoughtfully
stroll along Harvard Square in perfectly clean and nicely shaped
knickers would be rudely terminated by the authorities with arguments
of the sort that there exists regulation saying that such acts should
not be committed, and they were specifically told to spend money
[forcefully] appropriated from people like me to [forcefully] prevent
people from doing such things, and if one person starts walking around
in their knickers then others can also start doing that, and that would
insult the voting anal types because it is against the law that exists.
At which point I get tempted to tell the anal (that's "legal anal"
rather than "polemic anal"; I will deny any allegations of having
made hints that they are related) guys to shove their law where
it belongs, and take my knickers home, with a sad thought that my
plans of implanting the second head with a bush of penal attachments
may be just a tad premature...
Why can't one walk three blocks in their normal swimsuit from the Charles
River to Harvard Square? This is such a simple thing! As long as this
is totally unacceptable, how can you expect acceptance of free play
with really serious genetic and physical modifications?
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Alexander Chislenko: <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
Mailing list information: <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/mylist.html>
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