A little less neglected: Quotes

[jack]

These quotes not be quite up to the normal hoped for quality, however, I wanted to get something posted and they are all nice. Several of the gemmiest witticisms have been in interpersonal email recently, and I've stopped trying to catch them all and work out which are sufficiently context-free and non-private to reproduce, so aren't here.

"He has apparently never made any secret of the fact that he has a male friend with whom he maintains a platonic relationship, in all possible senses of the word."
--Rilstone?

"God made one of his rare personal interventions, striking York Minster with a bolt of lightening, a contribution widely regarded as having great rhetorical power but questionable logical validity."
--Rilstone?

"I wouldn't have been able to reject a scientific understanding of biology for religious reasons, any more than I would have followed the Bible if it said that the sky was bright green. [But it doesn't and I do follow.]"
--Rilstone?

G: Have you heard of Carcassonne?
M: Yes.
G: No not that one
-- I wish I could remember the exact context. It was where Mum was telling Grandfather about the board game, and it just seemed to epitomise his greater knowledge of original knowledge than of geek references to it. But I haven't been able to place it, but I'm quoting it now to get it off my 'to quote' file for good.

"That is some GREAT viral marketing. Very clever of them. Excuse me, I have to go fall for it now."
--nicked_metal

B: So, let me get this straight. Those photos are from [company]? And they're on the ceiling so the camera on the development board has something other than white to calibrate to when looking at the ceiling? And the weight of a ceiling tile is insufficient to stick blue-tack? So the only way of attaching them is to lift the ceiling tile and hold it down from above? So when boss comes by and asks why A is standing on the cupboards with his head in a hole in the ceiling, you were both genuinely actually working?
A: [goes back to computer] Don't worry, I'm stopping working now.
--work

"Mathematical folklore contains a story about how Acta Quandalia published a paper proving that all partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property, and then a few months later published another paper proving that no partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property. And in fact, goes the story, both theorems were quite true, which put a sudden end to the investigation of partially uniform k-quandles." -- Mark Dominus [When I first read this, I worried that perhaps I'd been wrong and there *was* such a thing as partially uniform k-quandles (well, temporarily) but for the non-mathmos out there who can't tell, not those are actual made up words, just very good ones]
--Mark Dominus

"In total, you were viewed 5 times and no people expressed interest in you.
You are more desirable than less than 20% of 17,007,618 people."
--Spark, via facebook

"Heck, most rocket science isn't rocket science."
-- Rocket Scientist (No, really.)

"[The] bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the British government depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that it has a buffoonish, slap-stick quality totally lacking in that particular novel."
-- Wikipedia on Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Comments

[simont]

All of your first three quotes with uncertain attributions are indeed from Rilstone: they're all from The Ballad of Reading Diocese (now sadly available only via the Wayback Machine).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes! Thank you. Someone linked to the wayback version in a long religion discussion, but I can't remember who now (I think atreic commented and said she was pleased to see it again, as it had left his website). So I read it and yanked out a lot of the best quotes, and assumed I'd remember where they must have been from :)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

OK, laughing at Wikipedia's failures of clue is like shooting fish in a barrel without any water in composed entirely out of fish, but still, how obtuse does one have to be not to grasp the Swiftian satire elements to 1984 ?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

But I hadn't seen it that way, at least until you said that. I think a satire is an over-exaggeration? So Newspeak is satire, because the idea that a repressive regime would do that is a mild extrapolation[1] of things they do do, but the idea that they could is a comic exaggeration of the futility of many linguistic measures? But at the time, I think I simply read it straight, as "It's a little unrealistic, but the idea is horrifying."

However, it still doesn't strike me as buffoonery or slap-stick. I don't know if I read it now I would. But those both seem to suggest it actually being funny, which I don't recall anyone saying. And a sense of ridiculousness I didn't think it had, but could be wrong about.

[1] Of course, that's interesting. Eg. universal surveillance might have been an insane over-the-top exaggeration at the time, but now is practically here.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

But I hadn't seen it that way, at least until you said that.

Ooops.

I think a satire is an over-exaggeration? So Newspeak is satire, because the idea that a repressive regime would do that is a mild extrapolation[1] of things they do do, but the idea that they could is a comic exaggeration of the futility of many linguistic measures?

I don't know; look at the success of the small and politically motivated linguistic cabal that got inclusive "he" replacing ingular "they" in common usage.

Some of the implementation details in 1984 feel to me to be very much satirically directed at the realities of wartime and immediately post-war austerity in Britain; 1984 being in some ways the ur-text of that great tradition of British SF where it rains all the time and everything smells faintly of boiled cabbage, which is not in general much to my taste.

However, it still doesn't strike me as buffoonery or slap-stick. I don't know if I read it now I would. But those both seem to suggest it actually being funny, which I don't recall anyone saying.

Orwell appears to have thought it was, and if I were a bit more on the ball I'd be able to cite where the heck I read him saying that. I had a conversation over the dinner table a while back about just how good a musical 1984 would make - you could have a Two Minute Hate song, and a "We have always been at war with... " song where it changed from Eastasia to Eurasia and back between verses, complete with people rushing around the background frantically swapping posters back and forth, and so on; it appeared on later googling that David Bowie once had the same idea and did a couple of songs for it.

universal surveillance might have been an insane over-the-top exaggeration at the time, but now is practically here.

That is a very good point.

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

I love the one about partially uniform k-quandles ^.^

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

I rather like the first quotation. Quotation. Quotation. It's a noun, you see, whereas quote is a verb.[/pedant]

Could be worse - guest speaker at my old school's prizegiving praised it as being a very socratic institution.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:) I would say it's an abbreviation, but I take your point.

guest speaker at my old school's prizegiving praised it as being a very socratic institution.

I would take that as saying an institution a lot like Socrates, what did he mean to say?

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

I'm sure he meant it to mean something relating to philosophy, thought and teaching. Of course, that's not how the semi-classically educated but puerile children listening took it.

[simont]

I assume that calling a school "Socratic" inadvertently has much the same connotation that Rilstone intentionally invokes with "Platonic", namely that the Greeks of that general era were, um, into small boys in a manner nowadays considered unwholesome.

However, I find I'm mostly thinking of the line from Cordelia in Shards of Honor: "I had a teacher who used to reflect back my questions that way. I thought it was the Socratic method, and it impressed me immensely, until I found out he used it whenever he didn't know the answer."

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was much more like my interpretation, I remember Socrates as convicted of corrupting youths, but had the impression he just sat in a barrel being insightful and gnomic and generating western philosophy in people's minds, which was subversive because people suddenly started answering questions with "Why", rather than any willy fun :)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The barrel was Diogenes, no ?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, that was just hyperbole.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

But in context, the willy fun makes a lot more sense.