Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Hume does not deny that there is such a thing as reason, or the will. He denies only the Cartesian conception of it."

"This is why I feel so sad on account of every unmarried Hungarian maiden. Children, more and more children must be born to Hungarian women, to ensure the survival of our kind." Well, he was ahead of his time.

"women still ran off to his place...after a funeral, aroused by the tears shed at the last rites." I do not know a more misogynist writer than Gyula Krúdy.

"And these Budapest ladies never let on they had glimpsed each other's souvenirs at the apartment at Lövész street." The cupboard of Patrick's love?

"But we cannot believe whatever we want, at will." Pretty sure some of us can ;-)

Hume never makes the distinction between accidental and law-like generalisations. Given the number of current arguments that turn on the confusion of correlation and causality, that is truly surprising.

"...or else we are not rational beings with respect to any of those beliefs that are most important and most fundamental for human life." Seeing that historically human reason followed human life, I would be surprised if this would be otherwise. And seeing the occasionally disastrous results of human reason for human life, I'm quite glad.

"Surely bookmarks still remain at the pages they were reading on their deathbeds."

"Our mainly administrative or institutional distinctions between subjects did not exist in Home's day - and perhaps they exist today primarily in merely administrative minds."... snigger...

Lord Arthur Saville's Crime

"I broke a finger yesterday" - conversational implicature = my finger, absence of person, cf Hungarian. Does each language have its own set of conversational implicatures?

Cracking a password on a 'slate': Greg Bear anticipates tablets. But Anna's phone uses fingerprint recognition to control access. :-D

"Don't write any more obituaries about me. These are short stories, Mother."

"I was amazed at the woman's stupidity, as she had lived among the Germans for 15 years but could not really speak a word of German or Czech.. " Ah, the arrogance of polyglots!

"That I might prove the truth of it..."

"(called "integrated relative clauses" by the Cambridge Grammar)" does this imply he is not using Cambridge terminology, and that 'pluperfect' only appeared to lift the curse of knowledge?

"...the problem with these errors is not that they betray a absence of logical thinking but that they betray a history of inattention to the printed page."

"Experiments that measure readers' comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular 'they' causes little or no delay, but generic 'he' slows them down à lot."

""What is not the practice of most, or of the best, is not part of our common language.""

"The pseudo-rule was invented by John Drymen based on a silly analogy with Latin (where the equivalent to a preposition is attached to a noun and cannot be separated from it)... cf Hungarian

"The whole passage on the massacre is not in the first edition... "

"For these writers, language is not a vehicle for clarity and grace, but a way to signal their membership in a social clique." Which is another of the systemic functions of language.

Though the claim that good prose leads to good thinking is not always true (brilliant thinkers can be clumsy writers, and slick writers can be glib thinkers), it may be true when it comes to the mastery of coherence." Really?

"A coherent text is one in which the reader always knows which coherence relation holds between one sentence and the next."

"Traditional style guides don't resolve the contradiction, but psycholinguistics can help."

"Expérimenter have recorded reader's eye movements and brainwaves as they work their way through sentences, and have identified both the major lures that lead readers astray and the helpful signposts that guide them in the right direction."

The original drowning cell! Intriguing that Csombor's 'brass man' is reduced to a mere 'pump' by the time Schema discusses the story.

"...a writer turn[s] out such tortuous syntax...when he shovels out phrase after phrase onto the page in the order in which thoughts occur to him."

examples :o

"...a multiply center-embedded sentence, though perfectly grammatical, cannot be parsed by mortal humans." or there is something amiss with your conception of 'perfectly grammatical'.