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Re: THOUGHTS re: stranger-danger; midges-midgets
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Stan Kelly-Bootle still detects "some terminological confusion.What makes linguistics (and semantics in particular) so exasperating is that we must use language to discuss and explain language....s1 -> S1 [Noise of Nabokovian feet rushing for the EXIT! Wait. Ti postoi, krasavista moya!]
There are plausible neurocognitive reasons why rhymes and puns are so appealing. Briefly: as we scan/parse incoming text-streams (written or spoken) we are continually (subconsciously) forming hypotheses, anticipating, filling gaps - triggering myriad migdet-swarms in adjacent clusters of neurons - hearing "Am I my brother's ..." has already triggered "keeper" before the arrival of KIPPER; one imagines a resulting minor fire-storm of synaptic giggles.".
JM: As I suspected, although the Bard concludes that "life is a stage", articulate art always signifies something.
As I had not suspected, jokes depend on an expected (silent and failed) meaning: it seems there's not a chance of any true cosmic laughter after all!
HH wrote: "Unless it can be proven to me - to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction - that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."
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There are plausible neurocognitive reasons why rhymes and puns are so appealing. Briefly: as we scan/parse incoming text-streams (written or spoken) we are continually (subconsciously) forming hypotheses, anticipating, filling gaps - triggering myriad migdet-swarms in adjacent clusters of neurons - hearing "Am I my brother's ..." has already triggered "keeper" before the arrival of KIPPER; one imagines a resulting minor fire-storm of synaptic giggles.".
JM: As I suspected, although the Bard concludes that "life is a stage", articulate art always signifies something.
As I had not suspected, jokes depend on an expected (silent and failed) meaning: it seems there's not a chance of any true cosmic laughter after all!
HH wrote: "Unless it can be proven to me - to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction - that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/