On 2024-03-30 04:37:31 +0000, Ross Clark said:

> On 30/03/2024 2:09 p.m., Snidely wrote:
>> Lo, on the 3/29/2024, Ross Clark did proclaim ...
>>> On 29/03/2024 11:06 p.m., Janet wrote:
>>>> In article <uu6226$78p3$1@dont-email.me>,
>>>> benlizro@ihug.co.nz says...
>>>>>
>>>>> Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with stones.
>>>>> It was three weeks before her body was found.
>>>>>
>>>>> Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
>>>>> called "Words Fail Me".
>>>>>
>>>>> She says:
>>>>> "In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could invent
>>>>> new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new
>>>>> words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot
>>>>> use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet
>>>>> mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but
>>>>> part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a
>>>>> sentence."
>>>>>
>>>>> Can anyone make sense of this for me?
>>>>> Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?
>>>>
>>>>     The listeners,  everybody who communicates in words.
>>>>>
>>>>> Further:
>>>>> "To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the
>>>>> sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a
>>>>> new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to it, is not at
>>>>> the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the
>>>>> English language as it is."
>>>>>
>>>>> Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").
>>>>>
>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
>>>>
>>>>    She was speaking in a series of radio talks broadcast by
>>>> the BBC. It's common for such speakers to directly address
>>>> the listening audience.
>>>>
>>>>      Janet
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, thank you, I do understand that point of usage.
>>>
>>> My question was meant to point out that when she says "You cannot
>>> use..." or "we cannot use..." in the first paragraph, or "you would
>>> have to..." in the second, it is just not true.
>>>
>>> People can and do use new words in the way she says is impossible.
>>> You do not have to invent a new language to use new words properly.
>>>
>>> She states these things as if she were revealing important truths about
>>> language in general, whereas they would seem to be purely private
>>> difficulties.
>>
>> If you were trying to suss out the private vs public distinction, or
>> the important truths vs internal struggle, I don't think your post was
>> a good start to that journey.  I believe Jerry got into that direction,
>> but the rest of us were either following up on the obvious questions of
>> two pronouns that mapped to the same concept, or the low-hanging fruit
>> of her claims being wrong in general.
>>
>> But perhaps the intended target of the OP had already set the context,
>> and only over here where it was orphaned was the compass needle
>> unsteady.
>>
>> /dps
>>
>
> No, I got something of the same responses there (though not as many).
> Sci.lang doesn't really set a context for this. All I'm doing is
> passing on the day-by-day notes in David Crystal's _A Date With
> Language_. Each day, it may be somebody's birth or death date, or
> "International ___ Day" that somebody has invented, or something
> else...all intended to have something to do with language. Crystal has
> one page of comment for each day -- I post variously notes on what
> Crystal says and things he quotes, my own reactions to same (as here),
> and bits of interesting information from elsewhere (often Wikipedia).

Yes, and in the process you have brought sci.lang back to life.

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

* Hibou <uu6418$7ms3$1@dont-email.me> :
Wrote on Fri, 29 Mar 2024 10:09:43 +0000:
>>>
>>> Crystal
>
> I'm not clear who that is.
>
>>> quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series called
>>> "Words Fail Me".

presumably

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Crystal

"a British linguist who works on the linguistics of English language."

there is a link to http://www.davidcrystal.com/ but I think Ross'
postings are from another blog.

* Madhu <m3y19ziwzx.fsf@leonis4.robolove.meer.net> :
Wrote on Sat, 30 Mar 2024 20:32:10 +0530:
> * Hibou <uu6418$7ms3$1@dont-email.me> :
> Wrote on Fri, 29 Mar 2024 10:09:43 +0000:
>>>> Crystal
>> I'm not clear who that is.
>>>> quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series called
>>>> "Words Fail Me".
>
> presumably
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Crystal
> "a British linguist who works on the linguistics of English language."
> there is a link to http://www.davidcrystal.com/ but I think Ross'
> postings are from another blog.

And, if i'd read Ross' respnse further down the thread, the posts are
from

"A Date with Language, was published by the Bodleian Press in
September. And the 7th edition of the Dictionary of Linguistics
and Phonetics, co-edited with Alan Yu, was published in
October."

[2023]

"In this ingenious and diverse collection of 366 stories, events,
and facts about language, David Crystal presents a selection of
insights from literary and linguistic writers, poets, and global
institutions, together with the weird and wonderful creations of
language enthusiasts to enliven each day of the year."

Ross Clark wrote:

> On 30/03/2024 3:21 a.m., jerryfriedman wrote:
>> Ross Clark wrote:
>>
>>> Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with stones.
>>> It was three weeks before her body was found.
>>
>>> Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
>>> called "Words Fail Me".
>>
>>> She says:
>>> "In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could
>>> invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent
>>> new words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You
>>> cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very
>>> obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate
>>> entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is
>>> part of a sentence."
>>
>>> Can anyone make sense of this for me?
>>> Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?
>>
>>> Further:
>>> "To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of
>>> the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to
>>> invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to it,
>>> is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can
>>> do with the English language as it is."
>>
>>> Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").
>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
>>
>> A complete transcript, with a link to a recording, is at
>>
>> https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/craftsmanship
>>
>> I agree with what people have said about "we" and "you".  As for making
>> sense of it, she clearly doesn't mean that you literally can't use new
>> words
>> because she knew plenty that had been invented during her life--radio,
>> radium, fascist, airplane/aeroplane...  What she's talking about, I think,
>> is how being a writer felt to her.  (Blaming words is ironic modesty,
>> intensified by her conspicuous mot-justice.). Specifically, I think she's
>> saying that when she has a problem expressing a subtle or original idea,
>> the solution of inventing a word isn't available, which may give a
>> feeling of how difficult the problem is.

> Thanks. Rather complicated but ingenious. Maybe right, for all I know.
> It's a problem I often have with literary people -- why don't they say
> what they mean? (But that would be so boring....)

Why doesn't everyone say what they mean? Why do people ask rhetorical
questions? Wouldn't it be cool, neat, awesome sauce, terrific, if
people just said what they mean? I'm stumped. Literally.

To answer more specifically about Woolf, I can guess that a successful
novelist would think the subjective is at least as interesting as the
objective. Beyond that, I'd need to know more about her. It was the
time of "Modernism" [*], which, I've read, had the idea of great art
as a heroic struggle to express things that could not be expressed any
other way. T. S. Eliot wrote in "East Coker" in 1940:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of _l'entre deux guerres_
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Eliot_East-Coker.pdf

I'll also add the two oldest versions found by the Quote
Investigator of a possibly paradoxical question. From the political
scientist Graham Wallas in 1926:

'The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told
to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, “How can I
know what I think till I see what I say?”'

From E. M. Forster in 1927:

'Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide [whose
novel _Les Faux-Monnayeurs_ is narrated "illogically"]—-that
old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of
being illogical. For some time she could not be brought to
understand what logic was, and when she grasped its true
nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous. “Logic!
Good gracious! What rubbish!” she exclaimed. “How can I
tell what I think till I see what I say?” Her nieces,
educated young women, thought that she was _passée_; she
was really more up to date than they were.'

https://books.google.com/books?id=CKAeEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT2956

Maybe Woolf was inspired by the same Zeitgeist, and maybe in this
piece the struggle for expression is both the topic and the
method. And yes, she did have to avoid boring her listeners.

[*] Not to be confused with _modernismo_ in Spanish-language
literature, which was even earlier.

>> She write[s],
>>
>> "All we can say about them [words], as we peer at them over the edge
>> of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they
>> live —
>> the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to
>> think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about
>> them, but about something different."
>>
>> Is linguistics an attempt to illuminate that cavern?

> Not with conspicuous success, if it is.
> Given the lack of enthusiasm for linguistics in places like a.u.e., I
> can't see a major literary luminary such as VW taking much interest,
> anyway.

Sorry, I didn't mean that she was thinking of the linguistics of
1937, not that I know much about it. I was thinking that linguists
can now say somewhat more about words and the cavern where they live
than Woolf could say then, even if most of the cavern is still dark.

--
Jerry Friedman

On 31/03/2024 8:13 a.m., jerryfriedman wrote:
> Ross Clark wrote:
>
>> On 30/03/2024 3:21 a.m., jerryfriedman wrote:
>>> Ross Clark wrote:
>>>
>>>> Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with
>>>> stones. It was three weeks before her body was found.
>>>
>>>> Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
>>>> called "Words Fail Me".
>>>
>>>> She says:
>>>> "In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could
>>>> invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent
>>>> new words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You
>>>> cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very
>>>> obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate
>>>> entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is
>>>> part of a sentence."
>>>
>>>> Can anyone make sense of this for me?
>>>> Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?
>>>
>>>> Further:
>>>> "To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of
>>>> the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to
>>>> invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to
>>>> it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what
>>>> we can do with the English language as it is."
>>>
>>>> Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").
>>>
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
>>>
>>> A complete transcript, with a link to a recording, is at
>>>
>>> https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/craftsmanship
>>>
>>> I agree with what people have said about "we" and "you".  As for making
>>> sense of it, she clearly doesn't mean that you literally can't use
>>> new words
>>> because she knew plenty that had been invented during her life--radio,
>>> radium, fascist, airplane/aeroplane...  What she's talking about, I
>>> think,
>>> is how being a writer felt to her.  (Blaming words is ironic modesty,
>>> intensified by her conspicuous mot-justice.). Specifically, I think
>>> she's
>>> saying that when she has a problem expressing a subtle or original idea,
>>> the solution of inventing a word isn't available, which may give a
>>> feeling of how difficult the problem is.
>
>> Thanks. Rather complicated but ingenious. Maybe right, for all I know.
>> It's a problem I often have with literary people -- why don't they say
>> what they mean? (But that would be so boring....)
>
> Why doesn't everyone say what they mean?  Why do people ask rhetorical
> questions?  Wouldn't it be cool, neat, awesome sauce, terrific, if
> people just said what they mean?  I'm stumped.  Literally.
>
> To answer more specifically about Woolf, I can guess that a successful
> novelist would think the subjective is at least as interesting as the
> objective.  Beyond that, I'd need to know more about her.  It was the
> time of "Modernism" [*], which, I've read, had the idea of great art
> as a heroic struggle to express things that could not be expressed any
> other way.  T. S. Eliot wrote in "East Coker" in 1940:
>
> So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
> Twenty years largely wasted, the years of _l'entre deux guerres_
> Trying to use words, and every attempt
> Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
> Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
> For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
> One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
> Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
> With shabby equipment always deteriorating
> In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
> Undisciplined squads of emotion.
> https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Eliot_East-Coker.pdf
>
>
> I'll also add the two oldest versions found by the Quote
> Investigator of a possibly paradoxical question.  From the political
> scientist Graham Wallas in 1926:
>
> 'The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told
> to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, “How can I
> know what I think till I see what I say?”'
>
>
> From E. M. Forster in 1927:
>
> 'Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide [whose
> novel _Les Faux-Monnayeurs_ is narrated "illogically"]—-that
> old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of
> being illogical. For some time she could not be brought to
> understand what logic was, and when she grasped its true
> nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous. “Logic!
> Good gracious! What rubbish!” she exclaimed. “How can I
> tell what I think till I see what I say?” Her nieces,
> educated young women, thought that she was _passée_; she
> was really more up to date than they were.'
>
> https://books.google.com/books?id=CKAeEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT2956
>
> Maybe Woolf was inspired by the same Zeitgeist, and maybe in this
> piece the struggle for expression is both the topic and the
> method.  And yes, she did have to avoid boring her listeners.
>
> [*] Not to be confused with _modernismo_ in Spanish-language
> literature, which was even earlier.
>
>>> She write[s],
>>>
>>> "All we can say about them [words], as we peer at them over the edge
>>> of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they
>>> live —
>>> the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to
>>> think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not
>>> about
>>> them, but about something different."
>>>
>>> Is linguistics an attempt to illuminate that cavern?
>
>> Not with conspicuous success, if it is.
>> Given the lack of enthusiasm for linguistics in places like a.u.e., I
>> can't see a major literary luminary such as VW taking much interest,
>> anyway.
>
> Sorry, I didn't mean that she was thinking of the linguistics of
> 1937, not that I know much about it.  I was thinking that linguists
> can now say somewhat more about words and the cavern where they live
> than Woolf could say then, even if most of the cavern is still dark.
>

I think the "cavern" passage is the best bit of Woolf's talk. (I haven't
read the whole thing.) And the Eliot is good, with enough first-person
singular in it so you know he's talking about his own work. My problem
with the Woolf is that her flat statements and her "we"s (inclusive or
exclusive?) and (generic) "you"s make it sound like a lecture about the
Nature of Language.

And the lack of examples just makes it worse. The "new words", you say,
cannot be just the neologisms of the early 20th century; nor, I think,
is she thinking of Joycean coinages (pace HH); so, if I follow you, she
would be talking about hypothetical "new words" that she herself _might_
create to deal with some writerly problem. Except that (she says) that
wouldn't work, because....

About the cute-but-paradoxical saying: thanks, I didn't know anything
about its history. If I were to apply it to VW, I would say "Fine, blurt
out whatever comes to you, but have some thought for your
listeners/readers, and try to elaborate on it so that they can follow it
back to your thoughts, which is what they're interested in." In this
case, you have had to do that work for her.

Ross Clark wrote:

> On 31/03/2024 8:13 a.m., jerryfriedman wrote:
>> Ross Clark wrote:
>>
>>> On 30/03/2024 3:21 a.m., jerryfriedman wrote:
>>>> Ross Clark wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with
>>>>> stones. It was three weeks before her body was found.
>>>>
>>>>> Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
>>>>> called "Words Fail Me".
>>>>
>>>>> She says:
>>>>> "In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could
>>>>> invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent
>>>>> new words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You
>>>>> cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very
>>>>> obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate
>>>>> entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is
>>>>> part of a sentence."
>>>>
>>>>> Can anyone make sense of this for me?
>>>>> Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?
>>>>
>>>>> Further:
>>>>> "To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of
>>>>> the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to
>>>>> invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to
>>>>> it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what
>>>>> we can do with the English language as it is."
>>>>
>>>>> Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").
>>>>
>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
>>>>
>>>> A complete transcript, with a link to a recording, is at
>>>>
>>>> https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/craftsmanship
>>>>
>>>> I agree with what people have said about "we" and "you".  As for making
>>>> sense of it, she clearly doesn't mean that you literally can't use
>>>> new words
>>>> because she knew plenty that had been invented during her life--radio,
>>>> radium, fascist, airplane/aeroplane...  What she's talking about, I
>>>> think,
>>>> is how being a writer felt to her.  (Blaming words is ironic modesty,
>>>> intensified by her conspicuous mot-justice.). Specifically, I think
>>>> she's
>>>> saying that when she has a problem expressing a subtle or original idea,
>>>> the solution of inventing a word isn't available, which may give a
>>>> feeling of how difficult the problem is.
>>
>>> Thanks. Rather complicated but ingenious. Maybe right, for all I know.
>>> It's a problem I often have with literary people -- why don't they say
>>> what they mean? (But that would be so boring....)
>>
>> Why doesn't everyone say what they mean?  Why do people ask rhetorical
>> questions?  Wouldn't it be cool, neat, awesome sauce, terrific, if
>> people just said what they mean?  I'm stumped.  Literally.
>>
>> To answer more specifically about Woolf, I can guess that a successful
>> novelist would think the subjective is at least as interesting as the
>> objective.  Beyond that, I'd need to know more about her.  It was the
>> time of "Modernism" [*], which, I've read, had the idea of great art
>> as a heroic struggle to express things that could not be expressed any
>> other way.  T. S. Eliot wrote in "East Coker" in 1940:
>>
>> So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
>> Twenty years largely wasted, the years of _l'entre deux guerres_
>> Trying to use words, and every attempt
>> Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
>> Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
>> For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
>> One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
>> Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
>> With shabby equipment always deteriorating
>> In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
>> Undisciplined squads of emotion.
>> https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Eliot_East-Coker.pdf
>>
>>
>> I'll also add the two oldest versions found by the Quote
>> Investigator of a possibly paradoxical question.  From the political
>> scientist Graham Wallas in 1926:
>>
>> 'The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told
>> to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, “How can I
>> know what I think till I see what I say?”'
>>
>>
>> From E. M. Forster in 1927:
>>
>> 'Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide [whose
>> novel _Les Faux-Monnayeurs_ is narrated "illogically"]—-that
>> old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of
>> being illogical. For some time she could not be brought to
>> understand what logic was, and when she grasped its true
>> nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous. “Logic!
>> Good gracious! What rubbish!” she exclaimed. “How can I
>> tell what I think till I see what I say?” Her nieces,
>> educated young women, thought that she was _passée_; she
>> was really more up to date than they were.'
>>
>> https://books.google.com/books?id=CKAeEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT2956
>>
>> Maybe Woolf was inspired by the same Zeitgeist, and maybe in this
>> piece the struggle for expression is both the topic and the
>> method.  And yes, she did have to avoid boring her listeners.
>>
>> [*] Not to be confused with _modernismo_ in Spanish-language
>> literature, which was even earlier.
>>
>>>> She write[s],
>>>>
>>>> "All we can say about them [words], as we peer at them over the edge
>>>> of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they
>>>> live —
>>>> the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to
>>>> think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not
>>>> about
>>>> them, but about something different."
>>>>
>>>> Is linguistics an attempt to illuminate that cavern?
>>
>>> Not with conspicuous success, if it is.
>>> Given the lack of enthusiasm for linguistics in places like a.u.e., I
>>> can't see a major literary luminary such as VW taking much interest,
>>> anyway.
>>
>> Sorry, I didn't mean that she was thinking of the linguistics of
>> 1937, not that I know much about it.  I was thinking that linguists
>> can now say somewhat more about words and the cavern where they live
>> than Woolf could say then, even if most of the cavern is still dark.
>>

> I think the "cavern" passage is the best bit of Woolf's talk. (I haven't
> read the whole thing.) And the Eliot is good, with enough first-person
> singular in it so you know he's talking about his own work. My problem
> with the Woolf is that her flat statements and her "we"s (inclusive or
> exclusive?) and (generic) "you"s make it sound like a lecture about the
> Nature of Language.

But I'll bet Eliot's shift from "I" to "one" had a reason, not that I know
what it was.

In a high school class on "composition" (or essays), my teacher said to
avoid phrases such as I think" and "in my opinion", as they weakened
one's writing. That's bad advice, I mean I'm not fond of that advice; I
prefer people to distinguish among fact, opinion, taste, and whatever
else, and I've said so to some here. But maybe Woolf was thinking along
similar lines--that repeatedly qualifying statements with "for me", "in
my experience", etc., would be pedantic and weak.

Some more speculations, if you're interested: She couldn't imagine
people whose experiences were different from hers. Or they didn't
matter to her. Or she was diplomatically pretending that her listeners
were as good at inventing words and rejecting them as she was.

To choose among those things or others, one might consult her essays
(six volumes), her diaries (five volumes) and her published letters (five
volumes). That's not the "one" that includes me.