Re: gaffs

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

>At 1997-11-29 06:12, Robin Turner wrote:
>
>>(h) There's a non-partisan - no, but I really mean this one, that from the
>>heart in the sense that some things, at least the way I look at this.
>>                                        George Bush again (Trudeau 1992)
Ashley wrote:
>
>This one appears to be plain nonsense. I'm not sure it's even grammatical.

Full marks!  In logical terms, it's not well-formed.  It was quite fun
watching my (Turkish-speaking) students trying to parse this one and then
coming to the conclusion that Bush had not in fact said anything at all.
>
>I have some more:
>
>(i) Pornography is rape.
>
>(j) Meat is murder.
>
>(k) Abortion is murder.
>
>(i) & (j) are on their face category errors, so they must be metonymic if
>they are to have any meaning at all. I think if you tried to translate
>any of these three into Lojban, the emotional subterfuge involved would
>become very obvious.

I would say "Pornography is rape" is metaphorical, not metonymic.  I'm
actually working on a web-essay on metaphor in the pornography debate at
the moment.  Certainly translating it into Lojban would result in an
obviously nonsensical sentence - not because of structural features, but
because of the prohibition of unmarked metaphor.  One big problem in
political discourse is the prevalence of unmarked metaphor, so an analogy
is often taken as a proof.  A more honest rendering would be "Pornography
is analogous to rape" or even "Pornography is a contributing factor in
rape."  Both these assertions, whether true or not, can be the subject of
rational debate, whereas the first would discourage this.
        "Meat is murder" is perhaps metonymic, boiling down to "Eating meat causes
one to participate in a chain of events which involves the killing of
annimals, which I hold to be as abhorrent as the killing of humans and
therefore can be classified as murder."  I shall bear this in mind when I
bite into my next kebab (vegetarianism is virtually unheard of here).
        "Abortion is murder" is a tenable, if inflammatory, position - since
murder is usually defined as the unlawful or unjustifiable killing of a
human being, if you regard a foetus as fully human and its destruction
unjustifiable, you can indeed claim that abortion is murder.  However, if
you do not clarify your terms, you risk equivocation, and such slogans
again do not encourage reasoned argument, IMHO.
        On the subject of politics and conlangs, Orwell's "Newspeak" is a nice
example.  I actually rather like some of the "reforms" of Newspeak (e.g.
getting rid of irregular verbs, ditching adverbs etc.) - the interesting
thing about it is its pragmatics, especially tolerance of blatant
contradiction (e.g. "War is peace").



Robin Turner

Bilkent Universitesi,
IDMYO,
Ankara,
Turkey.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>