Category Archives: fun

floccose, tomentose

Posted on September 29, 2012 | 5 comments

Today, a song: 

My darling, as I nuzzle
you close against my cheek,
a little bit of fuzz’ll
brush me – oh, that’s what I seek!

Floccose, tomentose, floccose, tomentose,
I love those mementos,
those little downy furs,
be they its or his or hers!

Tomentose and floccose, tomentose and floccose,
not crispy like tacos,
so fuzzy and so woolly,
you know they thrill me fully!

I find your fuzz so succulent,
so esculent, so poculent;
I hope you won’t be truculent
if I dare call you flocculent!

Floccose, tomentose, floccose, tomentose,
how to represent those
little hairs that cover you –
oh, darling, tell me true!

Tomentose or floccose, tomentose or floccose,
packed all chock-a-block, o,
say are they flocked in tufts,
or groomed to go to Crufts?

Your surface so tomentous,
it gives me such momentum –
it would be so momentous
if you’d give me some tomentum!

Oh, my darling, your fuzz gives me joy beyond belief;
you know that I could nevermore turn over a new leaf.
No flat tomato, you; you chloro-fill my heart with glee;
you put the beau in botany; yes, you’re the vine for me!

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Don’t tell me no lies

Posted on September 21, 2012 | 4 comments

For the weekend – and maybe a day or two after – I’ll fill this space with another piece from Songs of Love and Grammar (still available on lulu.com or amazon.com for just $12), about double negatives and negative concord. A friend of mine says he’s thinking of setting this to music. I’ll let you know if he does.

Don’t tell me no lies

I met a little lady from way down south
and I thought she was kinda sweet.
She had a tasty tongue in a cowgirl mouth
that said things you’d wanna repeat.

“I don’t never go for that city stuff –
I like my drinks and men smooth and hard.”
And I said, “Won’t you leave me when you’ve had enough?”
And she said, handing back my credit card,

“I don’t want none of your money, sweet,
I don’t care for no one but you.
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to cheat –
that ain’t nothin’ I’d wanna do.”

We had a little drink and we had a little dance
and we painted lots of red on the town,
and pretty soon we had ourselves a fine romance
and I took her out shopping for a gown.

Oh, I bought her a ring, and I bought her a home,
and I got her set up nice and neat.
But sometimes I’d worry she would use me and roam,
and whenever I did, she’d repeat,

“I don’t want none of your money, sweet,
I don’t care for no one but you.
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to cheat –
that ain’t nothin’ I’d wanna do.”

So now why am I sittin’ with my head hangin’ low
with nothin’ left, not even pride,
wonderin’ where my sweetheart and my money did go
and how I got took for a ride?

My gal was a master of verbal predation,
a lawyer who took her reward –
she tripped up my ears with double negation
that I thought was negative concord:

“I don’t want none of your money, sweet,
I don’t care for no one but you.
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to cheat –
that ain’t nothin’ I’d wanna do.”

The double negative is one thing the prescriptivists won on. English had negative concord for a long time – if you negate one part of a phrase, you negate them all for consistency, just as in some languages you make the adjective feminine if the noun is, for instance. Romance languages still use negative concord. But by the 19th century it was pretty much vanquished in English by appeal to “logic” (rather than appeal to Latin, which actually uses negative concord). And yet in many “nonstandard” versions of English it’s still used – and understood. After all, language doesn’t actually work like math. But the “standard” rules – put in place by the legal class, in fact – are what prevail in law.

Oh, and all those -in’ endings? That’s another thing prescriptivists won on. By the 18th century, the –ing suffix had come to be pronounced as “-in” by everyone (because the tongue is drawn forward by the vowel); rhymes by English poets of the time don’t work with the “ing” version. But the spelling hadn’t changed, and so it was insisted by those who taught the stuff that the ending should be pronounced as written. Nonetheless, while the formal standard has changed, the old way hasn’t been eradicated. By the way, saying “-in” isn’t actually dropping the g; there is no g to drop (ng is just how we write the sound – do you heard a “g” in there? only in words like finger). It’s just fronting the consonant – from the velum (at the back of the mouth) to the alveolar ridge (near the front).

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To split the sweet infinitive

Posted on September 3, 2012 | 1 comment

Instead of a word tasting note today, I present, for your entertainment, a video of my poem “To sweetly split the infinitive” from Songs of Love and Grammar. I think you’re going to really like it. 😉

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monadnock

Posted on July 9, 2012 | 4 comments

Spring comes thickly to this monadnock, this aboriginal inselberg. It sits solitary, a lush carbuncle, a furry emerald under a rug of green. There are no ranges of monadnocks as of Adirondacks and Monashees; a monadnock is a monad cnoc (there’s an Erse word for you, cnoc for hill), penetrating the peneplain, an instance of a type of which the archetype is Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, grandee of Algonquian name: Mount Isolated-Mountain.

So sits this, as remote as Maunganui, as grand as Mount Doom, but no volcano. Still it erupts: the verdure effloresces, and the clines of this eminence are a riot of inflorescence: raceme, corymb, umbel, panicle, thyrse, spadix, verticillaster, spikelet, ament, catkin, strobile, elating side by each. Waxwing, chickadee, and nuthatch flit and peck in this boreal forest; in the crepuscule and accreting dark the spike-billed woodcock rasps its froglike call. And in the syntax trees we catch the scrape of the claws of the nesting clause, which builds its inset breeding ground by weaving twigs, sprigs, fronds, scions, and tendrils as it delectates the lexis that everywhere expresses itself.

For we are in word country. This monadnock of manic thickets is no mere geologic rampike nor escaped esker or spring-gone pingo. Every kind of syntax tree grows here. There are short sentences. Sentence fragments. Passives can be seen. Look for the imperatives. You may find following a vine of a sentence you discover yourself down a garden path.

The ten thousand things revel in their names here, grow juicy nasals and voiced stops and succulent liquids, crisp aspirated plosives, fricatives with stridor that outstrips susurrus and cicadas, and vowels, oh, ah, ay, vowels so long a cuckoo may exhaust itself flying singing along them, and curious diphthongs twining out aside and around, and short sounds that skitter and rattle as quickly as a woodpecker’s chips. The monadnock’s mossy boulders hum with the richness of /m/ and /n/ and turn the ear quickly with the unexpected post-nasalized stop /dn/, and then you crack the rock itself.

This is all fertilized by millennia of quotations and citations and attestations and instances. As you traverse the base of our inselberg you step over Melville: “His great, Monadnock hump.” You embark on the trail, your foot upon Emerson: “Monadnoc is a mountain strong.” The plants clustered by the spring, the source, the fons et origo of the brook that parts this forest, are nourished by W.M. Davis from an 1870 National Geographic: “In my teaching, Monadnock has come to be recognized as an example of a distinct group of forms, and its name is used as having a generic value. A long paragraph of explanation is packed away when describing some other mountain as a ‘monadnock’ of greater or less height.”

But beware the population of poppies on the pool’s perimeter. Their seeds are the very seeds of words themselves, but you may relax and be lax as you drink in and find your self drink ing on till you are under the in flu ence of morphemes. No, you must stay clear of mind, for today we stalk that prehistorical theriomorph that fertilizes, enriches, fructifies, fecundates, prolificates this forest and its undergrowth, the monadnock’s eudaemonic thesaurus.

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ignotum

Posted on April 14, 2012 | 1 comment

There’s a poem I wrote several years ago that I never published anywhere, don’t know why. It would probably be best suited for a kids’ book, or at least a book for kids who don’t mind a couple of bits of Latin tossed in (in other words, just the best kind of kid). It’s not serious poetry, but I’m fond of it. Here it is:

Absent
by James Harbeck

This is a picture of something I lost.
I bought it somewhere; forget what it cost.
I’m pretty sure that it didn’t get tossed.

I took this picture the following day
just to recall that this thing got away.
It’s not for art; it has nothing to say.

There on the table you’ll see there’s a space
where it would be if it sat in its place.
I’m holding that spot for it now, just in case.

Have a good look so you’ll identify it
if, on some mission, you happen to spy it –
just bring it back here and end my disquiet.

You see, it’s the absence ’twixt table and air –
just look at the picture; there’s no need to stare,
you can see at a glance: it’s the thing that’s not there.

So bring me my thing and I’ll toss out this photo
the moment I have it concrete and in toto,
as large as the life and no longer ignoto.

Until then, I’m keeping this space in its spot.
But if it comes never, it won’t get forgot—
I still have my snap of the there that it’s not.

Now, what’s the unknown word in there? Ignoto. (You’ve probably seen in toto before.) Indeed, you won’t find it in a dictionary. Certainly not in an English dictionary. It’s unlikely you’ll find ignoto in a Latin dictionary, either.

So I just made it up? No… I knew the word ignotum, Latin for “unknown” (neuter; masculine is ignotus, feminine ignota). A dictionary will give you the nominative form. But the dative/ablative form is ignoto. Meaning (according to context) “by, from, or to the unknown”. So there. Now you know.

But this word ignotum, now. I like it. It’s a good word. As I sit here writing this, I’m listening to Magnum Ignotum, composed by Giya Kancheli and performed by members of the Koninklijk Filharmonik Orkest van Vlaanderen. It’s a delicate and dark piece, full of the great unknown. Which is what magnum ignotum means: “great unknown” (I admit it does look like it means “large bottle of wine without a label”).

The taste of ignotum? I’m tempted to say “I don’t know,” but actually I do. It has a strong taste of ignorant and other ignore words, naturally; they’re related. It may also remind you of ignoble, though I would not say that the unknown is per se ignoble, though the anagram gum on it rather is. And it has airs of ingot and I got ’em, both of which convey senses of gaining value – does the unknown add value? Often it does. Omne ignotum pro magnifico, as the saying goes: “everything unknown is taken as great” – the unknown tends to be exaggerated in value or importance.

At the heart of this word is that /gn/, the tongue stopping at the back and releasing with a nasal at the front; it makes me think of having a cold. But it made the ancient Greeks and Romans think of knowing: the gno root shows up in a variety of words relating to knowledge.

I don’t suppose we really need this word as an addition to English; we have a word already, unknown, which happens to be cognate – the un like the in that became i in ignotum, the know coming from the same Indo-European source as gno. But it fills a nice little spot, an obscure word for the obscure, even an unknown word for the unknown. Why not? If you look up ignotum you’ll likely first find the potted phrase ignotum per ignotius, “the unknown by the more unknown”, referring to an explanation that is more obscure than what it is explaining. Mounting confusion – sure to put some gum on it. How ignoble. But sometimes fun.

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clerihew

Posted on February 25, 2012 | 3 comments

How would you like to be an eponym?

I suppose it would depend on how you came to be eponymous. Some people have diseases named after them because they identified them (Down, Parkinson, et al. ad naus.); others have diseases named after them because they had them (legionnaires, for instance). Some people have forms of humour named after them because they inspired them (Spooner); some have forms of humour named after them because they created them.

In this last set belongs a certain Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who, as a British schoolboy, penned a little loose-rhythm quatrain:

Sir Humphry Davy
Was not fond of gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

(Was not fond of was later revised to Abominated.) He subsequently penned a number of others on the same model. Another example:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”

I think you can see the model. The first line is someone’s name (typically someone famous). This sets a pattern of usually two stressed syllables per line, but that is very loosely handled. The poem has two rhyming couplets, and tosses in some biographical detail about the person (Bentley’s books of clerihews include Biography for Beginners (1905), More Biography (1929), and Baseless Biography (1939)). It is important that the poem be amusing!

We note that the poems are not called bentleys. That would sound rather posh, and in particular would associate them with expensive cars typically driven by old-money types of people. (Even in Toronto, where Jaguars are a common sight and Lamborghinis can be seen driving by on infrequent occasion – and of course BMWs are more common than dirt – I see only a few Bentleys a year.) They are also not called edmunds. That would have some echoes of Shakespearean characters and a few other literary presences, and at the same time would be too well-known a person name to be all that distinctive. And it can’t help that it’s a sort of blunt sound with a dull vowel in the middle.

No, they are Clerihews, the least common of his three names. Clerihew is actually a Scottish family name, and in fact I know someone who comes from that family. [See the comments below for more on its origin.] You probably do not, as it really is not a common family name (neither is Harbeck, but I must say Clerihew has a certain idiosyncrasy that Harbeck does not). It seems almost to be the name of a bird, something like a curlew or a whippoorwill or perhaps a heronshew, or some other thing such as a creature like a fitchew hiding in the greenhew. Or perhaps an architectural feature like a clerestory in some mews.

The opening cl has a crisp clarity and cleanliness, a touch of class, though perhaps clerkish. All the vowels are front vowels (although the last one moves into a /w/), so there is a brightness to it, and the wheeze or sigh of the /h/ in the middle adds a softness, as of a pale or pastel hue – or a person breathing whew or phew.

The word as a whole anagrams to whericle, which is not a word but really should be; may I suggest that we now christen it one and use it to name a clerihew-type poem featuring not a person but a place, and (since the order of the word is reversed in four pieces) with the place name at the end, not the beginning, and starting (naturally) with where:

Where is an immenser
Historical dispenser
Of cheese, stone, and hassle?
Caerphilly Castle.

Where will you traipse
Over hills of peaches and grapes,
But find no cranberry bog in?
The Okanagan.

Where did the English entrench
Use of, and resistance to, French
More than at claret tastings?
The Battle of Hastings.

Most of the other words you can find in clerihew are not particularly related: chew, while, rice, rile, where, crewel; I do think rich is semantically relevant, but it doesn’t have much of the flavour of clerihew.

The big challenge of clerihews, aside from being witty, is to find a rhyme for the name; this can be on the difficult side at times. I’ve written a few recently for friends’ names, and you can see the contortions sometimes necessary:

Arlene Prunkl
Knew a little spunk’ll
Serve you in writing
And all kinds of uniting.

Antonia Morton
Waits for men to come a-courtin’:
Be they clients, be they lovers,
She knows her way between the covers.

Paul Cipywnyk
Doesn’t settle for what he’s giv’n: ich-
thyologic or prosaic,
He’s reliably apotropaic.

Margaret Gibbs
Keeps dolls in cribs.
She sees no analogy
Between that and genealogy.

They make a fun little challenge. (I also do them on request.)

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365 words for drunk

Posted on December 18, 2011 | 145 comments

I mentioned in my word tasting note for crapulous that I could do blog entries on words and phrases for “drunk” for a whole year. I don’t intend to do that, but I have decided to rise to the challenge and accumulate 365 words (and phrases) for “drunk”. I’m up to 263 351 362 so far (with the aid of several from other languages), and would like the assistance of my readers and their bibulous compatriots in making up the gap. Have a look at the list so far, and use the comments to add any I’ve missed.

And now you can have words for drunk on your shirt or mug! Buy the “drunk words” merchandise at Café Press – your handy reference for 302 ways of saying “drunk” in English!

Continue reading →

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cattery

Posted on December 11, 2011 | 9 comments

My friend Alex Goykhman forwarded an ad to me offering a deal: “$49 for 7 Nights of Cattery at the Lonesome Kitty Cat Hotel ($140 value).”

To modestly modify an Amy Winehouse song: What kind of cattery is this?

Well, we can feel quite certain that it has to do with cats one way or another. Aside from its being the Lonesome Kitty Cat Hotel, the formation cattery is quite unlikely to come from any false cognate such as the cata in cataplectic, catabasis, catastrophe, and so on. And cat is cognate with words throughout European languages (even borrowed into the non-Indo-European language Finnish as katti, which I particularly like). It even shows up in Byzantine Greek as κάττος kattos (meaning we could justifiably have had cattophile and cattophobe rather than the more opaque ailurophile and ailurophobe). The best guess is that the etymon was in Ancient Egypt, but we – hey, look, a kitty!

Spy cat (Jaggie and the bench)

Now, where were we? Ah, yes. The issue with this word is twofold. First of all is the issue of the multiplicity of meanings of cat (as opposed to The Multiple Cat, which is the name of a musical group who made a CD that I happened to pick up in a bargain bit titled “territory” shall mean the universe). This is illustrated by the assertion that the Web has gradually transformed from a cathouse to a cathouse – i.e., the videos occupying most of it, the joke goes, have shifted from smutty to kittycat. (See thedailywh.at/2011/11/14/all-cats-all-the-time-of-the-day/ for an amusing extended riff on this.)

Second is the ery ending. There are different kinds of words that end in ery, as illustrated by just the set of words ending in ttery: lottery, battery, buttery, cattery, chattery, cluttery, flattery, fluttery, God-wottery, guttery, hattery, hottery, littery, lottery, mattery, muttery, nattery, nitwittery, nuttery, plottery, polyglottery, pottery, rattery, rettery, ruttery, scattery, shattery, skittery, slattery, slottery, sluttery, smattery, spluttery, sputtery, stuttery, tattery, tittery, tottery, twittery. Some are adjectives formed on words ending in er; we can rule that out in this case, as there is no catter for something to be like. Some are mass objects referring to a kind of thing, such as pottery; others are mass objects referring to some more abstract thing that is pervasive in some context, such as polyglottery and God-wottery; others are mass objects referring to a condition or state of being, such as sluttery; and some are referring to a place where things are made and/or kept, such as hattery.

So here’s the thing: cattery, according to dictionary definitions, and as shown in general use even still if you search it on the web, is a word for a place where cats are raised and/or housed. So, yes, it’s a cathouse, but the kind where actual cats sleep – the Lonesome Kitty Cat Hotel is a lodging in Toronto for cats for when their owners are away. (Now, think for a moment: $49 for 7 days for the other kind of cathouse? Or even $140? Really?) But in that case it would be 7 nights of a cattery, no? Where’s that indefinite article? Its absence makes the word a mass object: the ad appears to promise 7 days of kitty-catness, or of being surrounded by or playing with cats, or something similar – no need to catalogue all possible nuances.

I must admit, 7 days of that kind of cattery would be quite appealing – if only I weren’t allergic. Let me tell you, the thought of seven days free of allergy and playing with kittens honestly brings tears to my eyes, I would enjoy it so much. But you can’t always get what you want. Just as the word cattery is double-crossed in the middle, tt, I have been double-crossed by nature.

So it goes. But cats are all around us, and their action in inaction and inaction in action is the way of the play of the world. For the multiplicity of cats, territory shall indeed mean the universe: we are in a cattery of cattery, all of us from the bottom of the gutter to Cat Deeley and Kim Cattrall; all is a fractal of cat fur. Just as your tongue, in saying cattery, reaches quickly like a paw from under the couch to pull in a bit of string or food, all things are subject to the subtle little paw of the cosmic cat, catching at the catenary from catabasis to catacomb, catalyzing all from cataract to cataclysm, alternately cataskeuastic and catastrophic. But I don’t wish to be catachrestic. I will simply say that the world is cattery, seven times a cattery, seven times seven – which is 49, which is how much it would cost for week of cattery.

I was going to end with that, but, given the season, I will tack on a poem I wrote almost exactly 20 years ago:

Cassandra the Cat

Cassandra the cat sits smugly, placidly purring;
outside, a violent winter storm is brewing.
Cassandra wants none of that; she’ll stay by the fire
and enjoy guests who give the odd drop of egg nog to her.

Cassandra goes vaulting off the top of the couch,
scampering under the chair of a startled guest,
and, after a whirlwind tour of the house,
comes back to the fire and quickly returns to rest.

Cassandra is master of all that she surveys;
that small plate of cakes could be hers, if she wanted,
but no, she won’t bother to get up off her duff –
she’s just finished eating, so she’s not even tempted.

Cassandra, in later evening, covers the heat vents,
and, purring, prowls the hallways and the stairs
searching for hitherto unforeseeable e-vents
and mice and spiders to catch all unawares.

Cassandra the cat, you furry door-mat, you owner of home and hearth,
you never pause to realize your net equivalent dollar worth,
but content you lie by fireside and sit on the laps and lick the cups of specially invited guests,
never believing that you could be freezing in cold and snow with nowhere to go in a darkened alley on a hungry belly, if it weren’t for your magnanimous hosts!

Cassandra the cat twitches her tail, looks up
with one eye, smiles, purrs and returns to her nap.

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Math… amazing

Posted on October 29, 2011 | 5 comments

Every so often someone will forward me one of these “amazing!” math tricks, and I will of course feel compelled to explain just how outrageously simple the math in them actually is. The latest one going around is even simpler and more obvious than most, and yet people still seem impressed by it:

Take the last two digits of the year you were born, add your age this year, and it will add up to 111. Amazing!

I have to say, I’m kind of amazed that it’s not gobsmackingly obvious to absolutely everyone who can add and subtract two digits. But so many people will do anything to avoid arithmetic, so it seems to have that “magic wand” quality pretty readily.

So OK. Say someone were to send you an email that said “The year you were born plus your age this year equals 2011 – but only this year! Amazing, huh?” Wouldn’t you find that obvious? Now, 2000–1900=100, and you were born in the 1900s (we assume no one under 12 years old got the email), and it’s 2011 now…

Put it another way: if you subtract 1900 from everything, as though 1900 were the year 0, this year would be the year 111; and if you start with the last two digits of your birth year, you’re subtracting 1900, so…

There are some really cool number tricks out there. But you don’t too often see them being passed around in emails, because different people have different definitions of “cool”.

At the very least, they could try tricks that use more than just disguised simple addition and subtraction. For instance, there are fun facts such as that your age (or any two-digit number) plus the reverse of your age (e.g., 49+94) will always be divisible by 11 (in fact, it will be 11 times the sum of the digits in your age); your age minus the reverse of your age, or the reverse of your age minus your age (e.g., 94–49) will always be divisible by 9; your age minus the sum of its digits (e.g., 49–13) will also always be divisible by 9… And the digits of any number divisible by 9 will always add up to a number divisible by 9, which means if you have any two-digit number divisible by 9 and add its digits, you will get 9 or (in the case of 99) a number the digits of which add to 9.

All of this is explainable with simple algebra on the basis that a two-digit number cen be represented as ten times a one-digit number plus another one-digit number, e.g., 49=(4×10)+9.

So for any number 10x+y (e.g., 40+9, where x=4 and y=9), the reverse will be 10y+x (e.g., 90+4), meaning if you add 10x+y (the original number) to it you get 11x+11y (e.g., 40+9+90+4=44+99), and if you subtract the reverse you get 9x–9y (e.g., (40+9)–(90+4)=40+9–90–4), and if you subtract the sum of the digits (x+y, e.g., 4+9) you get 9x (because 10x+y–(x+y)=9x, e.g., 40+9–(4+9)=36). And of course 10x+y+10y+x=11x+11y=(x+y)×11.

So assuming a person of a normal adult age, you can say

1. Take your age (e.g., 49).
2. Add the digits together (e.g., 4+9=13).
3. Subtract that from your age (e.g., 49–13=36).
4. Add the numbers of the resulting number together (e.g., 3+6).
5. The answer is 9.

Of course, you want to gussy this up with something fancy. Add in some other calculations to distract. Instead of step 5, maybe say

5. Multiply by the last two digits of the year.
6. The answer is 99. This always works!! But it will only work this year!!! And not again for a hundred years!!!! OMG it’s amazing tell all your friends!!!!11

or, if you think they can handle the math (!), say

5. Now add your age to the reverse of your age (e.g., 49+94).
6. Divide the result by the sum of the numbers in your age (the number in step 2).
7. Multiply this by the number from step 4.
8. The result is the answer to the question “Who’s the greatest hockey player of all time?”!!! OMG Gretzky rules!!! Number 99 forever!!!!

Even this is pretty straightforward for people who like to think about numbers. But there aren’t that many of us. Anyone who graduated from high school is officially able to figure this sort of thing out easily. But as long as people think math is hard and mystifying…

I suppose you could argue that the general “Numbers! Oh noooooes!” attitude people tend to have in our culture allows them actually to have fun with simple things like this, but it deprives them of the much greater fun they can have with more complex number problems, and it makes them easy marks for misleading advertising, misleading politicians, and so on. And generally vulnerable to making dumb mistakes. There’s a classic Dilbert cartoon (two of them, in fact) illustrating this – see http://search.dilbert.com/comic/40%25%20Sick.

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This statement is false

Posted on September 22, 2011 | 6 comments

Last weekend my brother and I were discussing the statement “This statement is false.” Today a colleague mentioned a similar statement, “The following statement is true. The previous statement is false.” Another colleague likened this kind of pure self-contradiction to the Cretan paradox, also known as the Epimenidean paradox: the statement “All Cretans are liars” said by a Cretan, which would seem to be a false if it’s true and true if it’s false.

But the difference between the Cretan paradox and pure self-contradiction is that the Cretan paradox has a real-world referent. It makes a statement about something external to the assertion. Pure self-contradiction has no real-world referent. It makes an assertion about nothing other than itself and thus has no truth value ascertainable.

As it happens, the source of the Cretan paradox is something Epimenides wrote in support of the immortality of Zeus:

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.

Epimenides was himself a Cretan. Thus we know through simple pragmatics that he must have been excluding himself without saying so. To treat it as a paradox is to be disingenuous. It’s fun sport, but in the end it just shows one of the things you can’t do in logical reasoning.

Statements such as the Cretan paradox are an illusion caused by conflation of one level of analysis with a higher level of analysis: an evaluation of the members of a set cannot itself be a member of the set evaluated; evaluation is a comparison of something against one or more criteria from an external perspective – what is being analysed is subsumed within its perspective. Once we acknowledge that the statement “All Cretans are liars” cannot be part of the set of statements evaluated (making it thus a simple problem in pragmatics rather than a trick of logic), we identify an unstated assumption that makes it function, without which we get a sort of Escher staircase illusion, something that can’t exist in the real world.

But with mutually evaluative statements such as the pure self-contradictions, each must be on an evaluative level above the other – each must subsume the other within its perspective. And at the same time each has no further reference; it has no claim to truth or falsehood as the set of all other statements by Cretans does (and as that set’s members individually do).

Analyzing an utterance or set of utterances is like weighing an object. In order to weigh an object, you have to lift it (or anyway support it) and you have to be resting on something that is not part of what you are weighing. In the Cretan paradox, we see that the statement that pretends to be part of the set of Cretan statements is actually weighing them and so cannot be part of them; it is evaluating them against their real-world references – that’s what it’s resting on. In the mutual contradiction case we’re looking at, each is weighing the other, and neither rests on anything else, because neither is being evaluated against anything external to itself. It’s like two dudes trying to lift each other simultaneously. In empty space.

Meaning in human communication, ultimately, is not a question first of all of logic; it is a question first of all of pragmatics. All communication is behaviour; when you utter something, you are doing something with the aim of producing a certain effect. The person hearing you will be conjecturing what effect you are trying to produce and responding accordingly. Logic helps serve this function, but pragmatics is the true basis. And the pragmatic value of things such as paradoxes is sport – mental play, fun. And a demonstration of the invalidity of certain kinds of reasoning.

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