Brad

Love them.

genties and ladlemen is my current favorite.

But they are really a subset of puns.

for the best puns ever read spider robinson (especially callahans place novels)

spiderrobinson.com

Live it.

Ryan

My tutor, a student of classical Greek, told us that the “barbarians” were foreigners (Persians, I believe), who were only capable of inchoate babblings that sounded like “bar-bar-bar.” (I think he told us that the term originated in Herotodus’s discussion of the Persian invasions of Greece, but I may be wrong about that.)

Thus, the word “barbarian” is an echoic reduplicative that has the same sense as the word “baby.” In other words, those Persians who invaded Greece thought they were scary, but they were really just big babies.

Congrats!

A statement of the form:-
A implies B
B implies C
Therefore A implies C
…is indeed a syllogism, but it doesn’t apply to the Socrates example, and doesn’t have anything to do with modus ponens. It is in fact a hypothetical syllogism, whereas the Socrates example is a categorical syllogism, or more specifically a universal syllogism (there is also something called a disjunctive syllogism, but I won’t go into that).

The universal syllogism (or any categorical syllogism) often isn’t considered a discrete law in modern logic because it is in fact a combination of two existing rules (and therefore requires an intermediate step): the rule of universal instantiation (that is: what is true of every individual thing must be true of any one thing) and modus ponendo ponens (more commonly just called modus ponens), which says:-
A implies B
A
Therefore B

The full universal syllogism, therefore, would look like:-

For-all x in set S (A(x) implies B(x))
Therefore A(c) implies B(c) when c is an element of S
A(c) implies B(c)
A(c)
Therefore B(c)

Or in the Socrates example:-

(Begin universal instantiation)
For all things, if that thing is a man, then that thing is mortal
Therefore if Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal
(Begin modus ponens)
If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Because we are used to categorical syllogisms, we tend to take “If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal” as implicit, but in modern logic, which tends to be concerned with what computers can understand, it’s not admissible to skip a step like that, and “If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal” is what’s known as a ‘lemma’: a minor conclusion that needs to be proven (even if only in one step in this case) in order to reach the major conclusion.

To get to the point, the reason that you can’t say:-
For all things, if that thing is a man then that thing is mortal
Socrates is mortal
Therefore Socrates is a man

…is simply because the implication operator in the first premise is a one-way relationship (the implication operator is thus said to be ‘non-commutative’: it has an ‘antecedent’ and a ‘consequent’ which are not interchangeable). “A implies B” just says that if A is true, B is true (and, as a result, that if B is false, A is false). It doesn’t say what happens when B is true (A might be true or false), or when A is false (B might be true or false). It should also be noted that the implication operator says only this: it doesn’t say anything about causality. B might be caused by A (”If I have a haircut, then my hair will be short.”) or A might be caused by B (”If I have less money today than yesterday, then I have paid for something.”) or neither (”If I go outside, then I will go to my Logic class”: going outside is necessary for going to class, but is not the cause of it).

Sorry if this overly long post just confused the issue…

Thanks, Julie!

fourth paragraph should be

the trick is that you need to keep order and B needs to always be true if A is true, as well as C needs to be always true when B is true.

And further down I should add that

then Socrates is mortal. is (A implies B)

It works in mathematics, and other logic as well as rhetoric, and is the basis for rule chaining in Expert Systems.

In the logic world, the rule is called Modus Ponens, and it works out to

If A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C

the trick is that you need to keep order and B needs to always be true if A is true, as well as C needs to be always true when A is true.

The Socrates example is

If all men are mortal (note this is B implies C)
and Socrates is a man (this is A implies B)
then Socrates is mortal.

If your second proposition is Socrates is mortal, you have A implies C, and you cannot infer that A implies B - you don’t have the logical chain.

I knew that Masters in AI would come in handy some day.

http://anneisaman.blogspot.com/2008/03/rethorics-series-by-word-nerds.html

A

Tyler is absolutely right. This was an example of my being overly fastidious; I mixed up the two speeches of Brutus and Marc Antony.

Brutus’s speech begin with “Be patient till the last.” He then goes on to give a speech as logically compelling and as rhetorically flat as a Jimmy Carter speech on energy conservation.

It is Marc Antony who is the successful rhetorician–in the negative sense of the term. Throughout his speech, Antony repeats the refrain “Brutus is an honorable man”==but each time, he juxtaposes it with a counter-example of Julius Caesar’s life that makes the phrase more and more bitterly ironic. At the end, he has whipped the Roman rabble into a frenzy.

Thanks, Tyler, for setting me straight.

Just for fun, I’m making my comments/additions relate to a theme: Joints.

I don’t think you guys fit in any of these, but I could be mistaken:

Knee: “to take a knee” football reference, but useful as metaphor?
Knuckle: “to knuckle down” to get to work, get busy
Shoulder: “shoulder to the wheel” to get to work, get busy
Hip: lots of uses. cool, trendy. “hit me on the hip” wireless lingo - call me
Elbow: to walk with, to accompany. Probably from Cowboy Slang
Wrist: “Limp-wristed” Slang for effeminate or epicene
Ankle: to walk. Also a Cowboyism.

I do like “Herzschmerz.” Let’s see if we can convince Americans to start using it! It’s got a nice ring to it.

“Etwas liegt mir am Herzen” has a positive connotation and is roughly equivalent to “it is close to my heart”, meaning being fond of something or somebody.

On the other hand, “etwas liegt mir auf dem Herzen” is more neutral and refers to something that is an inner burden, something you have had on your mind and would like to talk about.

Also, I’m not sure if this word has come into English usage like “Zeitgeist” and “Schadenfreude”, but I really like “Herzschmerz” (a description for figurative heart pain, lovesickness) for its rhyme, which gives the painful subject a bit of a humorous twist.

Occasionally I encounter people who dismiss my interest in frame language by saying something like, “Oh, that’s just rhetoric. The Greeks and Romans invented that stuff centuries ago.”
To me that seems accurate, but also incomplete a…