Strange Words Research Articles

On Particle Verbs and Similar Constructions in German (review)

Reviewed by: On particle verbs and similar constructions in German by Anke Lüdeling Gary H. Toops On particle verbs and similar constructions in German. By Anke Lüdeling. (Dissertations in linguistics.) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2001. Pp. xiv, 178. ISBN: 1-575863-01-4. Cloth $65.00. Paper $23.00. Lüdeling’s examination of German ‘particle verbs’ includes verbs traditionally regarded as having so-called separable prefixes (ankommen ‘arrive’, abfahren ‘depart’, anlachen ‘laugh at, deride’) as well as verbs occurring together with fixed manner adverbs (wach küssen ‘wake with a kiss’, kaputtmachen ‘break’, etc.). In the introduction to this somewhat revised version of her doctoral dissertation, L reveals that her work has led her to conclude that particle verbs as such do not actually exist and that ‘what people call particle verbs are lexicalized phrasal constructions’ (ix–x). Nevertheless, L indulges the reader with the following working definition: ‘Particle verbs are constructions that consist of a verb and a preverb and that behave like words in some respects and like syntactic constructions in others’ (1). According to the author, there are two basic problems associated with the notion of German particle verbs: One is the ‘structure problem’ concerning the question of whether particle verbs are morphological objects or phrasal constructions; the other is the ‘delimitation problem’ concerning the question of how particle verbs can be distinguished from similar (surface) constructions. To obviate these problems in the course of her examination, L adopts as a convenient construct the cover term ‘preverb verb constructions [PVCs]’ (22–23). In the second of six chapters, ‘Particle verbs in syntax, semantics, and phonology’, L demonstrates that a given preverb may or may not be subject to adverbial modification (cf. Sie machten die Tür zum Balkon ganz auf ‘They opened the door to the balcony all the way’ vs. *Sie führten das Stück ganz auf ‘They performed the play all the way’). She formulates a test whereby an element is a phrase or an independent word if it can be modified. L maintains that the separable prefix auf of aufmachen ‘open (up)’ in the former sentence is modifiable by an adverb like ganz ‘completely, all the way’ because it is semantically independent or transparent while in the latter German sentence, the same preverb auf of aufführen ‘perform, put on’ cannot be adverbially modified because it lacks semantic independence (56–57). Observations such as these lend support to L’s assertion that German particle verbs do not constitute a uniquely delineable class (119, 129, 138, and passim). In Ch. 3, ‘Particle verbs in morphology’, L concedes that it is ‘difficult to assert the category of a prefix’. Reasoning, however, that separable prefixes historically developed from prepositions, with which many of them remain homophonous, L argues that a number of separable prefixes ‘have the semantic content of a preposition’ (71). In Ch. 4, ‘Strange words or strange phrases?’, L further maintains that prefixes (or particles) ‘are never syntactic complements, but always secondary predicates or adverbs’ (135). In Ch. 5, ‘Preverbs as secondary predicates or adverbs’, L demonstrates that all PVCs (see above) lend [End Page 812] themselves to a phrasal analysis even if they do not constitute a uniform class of constructions. She maintains that, structurally, preverbs appear in two distinct positions—either as sisters to V or as V′ adjuncts (159). On the whole L’s argumentation is precise, thorough, and easy to follow. In the span of only 164 pages, L manages to subject PVCs to an impressive array of diagnostics. Equally impressive is her facility in citing and providing clear summaries of the work of others as it relates to her own discussion of the relevant facts. Gary H. Toops Wichita State University Copyright © 2003 Linguistic Society of America

What Remains of Jean Genet?

This essay argues that Jean Genet's critique of racism in his play The Blacks shares with his contemporaneous art theory an idealist subordination of historical particularities to what exceeds or endures beyond such particularities. Reading "The Studio of Alberto Giacometti" and "The Strange Word of . . . " together with The Blacks illuminates some otherwise cryptic images of death and ruins in the play and, in the process, indicates the distance between Genet's frequent recourse to the figure of remains in protesting social injustice throughout the late 1950s and early '60s, and subsequent multiculturalist efforts to critique racism through the historical contextualization and defense of diversity.

Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah by Michael Mack (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 243 and whether in 'War beides wahr | Und beides trug' (p. 291) the last word should be 'trog'. In 'Titans Wetterleuchten' (p. 229) Jean Paul's character Roquairol is called 'Raquairol'. The strange word 'volksauspeisungswissen' (p. 231) appears to be a misprint : H. G. Adler's edition has the more plausible 'volksausspeisungswissen'. Most of these and similar puzzles can only be solved by examining the Steiner Nachlass in Marbach. Such an examination remains necessary for anyone undertaking the interpretative study of Steiner's poetry which is now desirable, and which Jeremy Adler has shown himself exceptionally qualified to write. St John's College, Oxford Ritchie Robertson Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah. By Michael Mack. (Conditio Judaica, 34) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2001. vii + 23opp. ?52. ISBN 3-484-65134-2 (pbk). Michael Mack has done a tremendous service to Canetti scholarship by comparing and contrasting Canetti's theory ofthe crowd with Franz Baermann Steiner's anthro? pology of danger. Since Mack's study is the firstdetailed examination of Steiner's relation to Canetti, it deserves to be called ground-breaking. However, Mack has made an important contribution to German-Jewish literary and cultural history in more than one respect: his study rediscovers Steiner's poetry and anthropological work in its own right. Much of it has only subsequently been published (Steiner, Selected Writings,ed. by JeremyAdler and Richard Fardon, 2 vols (Oxford: Berghahn, 1999)). The introduction, which briefly recounts Steiner's life and work as well as his friendship with Canetti, makes the case that both writers share an anthropological re? sponse to the Shoah. Turning away from purely literary writing, Steiner and Canetti engage in a social anthropology that is concerned with an ethical impact on the reader. Although the thematic concerns of the two writers appear to be quite divergent in that Canetti focuses on the phenomenon of the crowd and Steiner on a sociology of danger, Mack argues convincingly that both thinkers are ultimately concerned with analysing violence that knows no limits (p. 4). The firstpart deals with Canetti's well-known flouting of established notions of scholarship in Crowds and Power and its uneasy generic status between literature and anthropology. Applying Dominick LaCapra's use of Freudian concepts, Mack sug? gests that Canetti's literary devices such as his 'rhetoric of immediacy', his 'thinking in images', and defamiliarization techniques result in a type of 'thick description' (Clifford Geertz's term) that is an implicit acting-out of trauma. The second part moves on to a discussion of Steiner's anthropology, in particular his theory of taboo as avoidance of danger and power. Placing Steiner's thinking in the context of British anthropology and its shift from evolutionism to functionalism , Mack argues that, unlike his mentors, Steiner pinpointed the West's failure to understand Eastern concepts. There follows a comparison of Steiner's thesis on slavery with Edward Said's Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1977), in which Mack highlights Steiner's pre-deconstructionist critique of Western 'epistemic violence' (p. 112). This prepares the ground fora detailed analysis of Steiner's theory of taboo, at the heart of which is the idea that taboos are 'thought-out rituals that help prevent social tensions and violent divisions within society' (p. 133). The final part focuses on the notion of literature as scholarship in Steiner's and Canetti's works. Returning to Canetti's hybridization of literature and anthropology, Mack puts forward the idea that Canetti's insistence on the factuality of his argument underlines his claim to responsibility. By presenting normal behaviour as psychopathic , Canetti aims at a metamorphosis of social practice. The 'acting-out' that 244 Reviews characterizes Crowds and Power should therefore be understood as a provocation for a 'working-through' (p. 152). However, if Canetti does ontologize violence, then this raises the question how social change can be instigated at all and what the basis for his notion of metamorphosis is, a point that Mack does not address. His application of the Freudian notion of 'working-through' to Crowds and Power is, in my view, the least convincing argument of his study in that it...

Translated Accounts: A Novel

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: FictionFull AccessTranslated Accounts: A NovelJAMES R. MERIKANGAS, M.D., JAMES R. MERIKANGASSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Washington, D.C.Published Online:1 Dec 2002https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.159.12.2120AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail We live in the age of atrocity. Gone are the good wars, the mustering of armies to fight evil, oppression, or the march of invaders into sovereign lands. Now we reap the whirlwind, the dust of Dresden, the ashes of Hiroshima, and we hear the cries of civilians murdered by the thousands and millions to further the psychotic dreams of charismatic tyrants, all in the name of clans, religions, or races.Too soon we become jaded by the prevalence of abuses. We ignore the erosion of human rights: the right to privacy, the right to self-determination, and the very right to life. Where are the voices speaking out against these crimes? Unfortunately our senses are dulled to the point where even the screams of the dying are ignored. What remains is ART, the universal expression of our humanity, which transcends boundaries and cultural barriers to speak to the esthetic and moral sense that is shared by all humankind.James Kelman is one such voice. In his Booker Prize-winning novel, How Late It Was, How Late(1), he narrated the struggle of one drunken ex-convict to regain his dignity after being beaten by the police, leaving him blind and indigent. Translated Accounts is more on the scale of our present-day horrors.The setting of the novel is an unidentified country in unidentified turmoil, with “Securitys” of an unknown state enforcing an arbitrary law. No one is identified by name, not even the protagonists, who may be several or one. No location is identified; only events serve to advance the semblance of a plot. Kelman states, “These are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak then it is these, if I may speak.”This fragment hints at the structure of the book, which purports to be transcriptions and translations of anonymous speakers from a foreign language by a person or agency not fluent in English. Unlike some of Kelman’s other works, which are written in the Glaswegian dialect and therefore hard to understand, this novel, if you call it that, has no beautiful prose, no magical metaphor, only plain speech. The simple language, however, has a strange word order, as if it were transliterated from German or some other tongue with the verbs in the wrong place. The result has a singsong quality, which reads almost like poetry, amazing in its consistent adherence to a rule unknown to the reader.This is not an easy book. It challenges the reader to work at understanding and thereby slows us down, making us dwell on the content of terrible crimes. Descriptions of rape, torture, mutilation, and “disappearances” are so remarkably bland that they startle more than graphic or florid descriptions. The Kafkaesque mystery and Beckettesque acceptance make Translated Accounts more compelling than and more unlike the usual modernist stream of consciousness of other modern works.Let the reader decide if this tour de force succeeds or if it is just another proof of Golding’s claim, “To communicate is our passion and our despair.”By James Kelman. New York, Doubleday, 2001, 334 pp., $24.95.Reference1. Kelman J: How Late It Was, How Late. New York, Random House, 1997Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 159Issue 12 December 2002Pages 2120-2120 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2002 Published in print 1 December 2002

Practical and Academic Aspects of Social Work Development in Lithuania

[full article and abstract in Lithuanian; abstract in English]
 Several years ago the reaction of an ordinary Lithuanian citizen, politician or even a professional (teacher, medical doctor, psychologist) to such word combinations a social work or social worker was not only awkward but often negative: What a strange word combination! Is it necessary to make references to work when naming a profession? Maybe such notions of recent past as party work, party worker or trade union worker accounted for the negative attitude towards the said word combinations. Almost 10 years passed, and the concepts, such as social work or social worker became common. They no longer jar on nobody’s ears. However the following questions are still topical: What is social work? What do social workers do? Is it science or art? The majority of sciences have developed from philosophy. They have scientific names, usually of Latin or Greek origin. The beginning of social work is associated with charity or philanthropic activities.

What's so difficult about ECGs--a bundle of what?

In the first in a series of understanding ECGs Dominic Cox and Hamish Dougall take you through the basics Are electrocardiograms (ECGs) difficult? Should we believe the titles of numerous texts written on the subject, which proclaim “ECGs Made Easy,” “ECGs Made Simple,” or “ECGs So Simple Your Granny's Cat Could Do Them”? We'll let you into a secret. Reading ECGs is not that difficult. A medical student can make the majority of important diagnoses just as well as a cardiologist and probably far better than the average orthopaedic surgeon. (The definition of a double blind study is an orthopaedic surgeon and an ECG.) At present you may run for cover on seeing an ECG. We hope to show you that there is no need to do this. If you experience a combination of confusion, apathy, and palpitations on hearing strange words, like ECG mapping, signal averaging, and QT dispersion by a consultant cardiologist on a ward round, take heart. Such discussions are intellectual twaddle and completely unnecessary for the majority of practising doctors to understand. All you need is to understand the basics of the ECG and the rest is simple pattern recognition. We hope to show that, with a simple approach to ECGs, you will no longer fear these “squiggly lines” and that they will aid and enhance your understanding of patients on a daily basis in whatever area of medicine you practise. The heart is a simple, robust, and clever machine that beats around 3.2 billion times during an average life. It adapts to its situation by becoming more efficient the more it is used. It never stops (we hope) and it takes quite a battering from our lifestyle. A reasonable analogy in understanding the heart and therefore ECGs is to think of the heart as the …

Learning Mathematics Vocabulary: Potential Pitfalls and Instructional Strategies

Do your students speak mathematics, or do they think that the mathematics classroom is another country where they must use a foreign language? Are they sometimes confused or overwhelmed by new vocabulary? Do they misuse words, forget key terms, or ignore important distinctions between words? Do they ask, “Where did anyone ever get a strange word like asymptote?” or “I forget, is twelve a factor or a multiple of twenty-four?”

Physical

I'm at her right side, stooping over the bed. Her arm dances a rotating, pronating ballet, the radial hump and hard straight metacarpal ribs outlined as her hand grasps mine, familiar as illustrations in dog-eared Cunningham's. Muscles close on muscles, tendons brace briefly, thumbs wrap, skin on skin, hers cool and papery thin at the pulp; some moisture, a little tremor: hers or mine? She rests her head back on fresh puffed pillows, watches me count the wrist pulse pushing its sheath toward my fingers. The carotid rises up from her chest inlet and falls again like the tide: more anatomy. The nurse turns down the sheet, helps her drop her nightgown to the waist. The skin over her breasts is dappled with brown marks like leaf fall. My legs and back are braced and already aching: I haven't learned yet this is sit-down work. I'm gangly with my virgin stethoscope, but remember to rub it on my coat to take the chill off the metal. I hear sounds I think I am supposed to hear that were only strange words in textbooks. Does she know I haven't done this before?

'What the Hell Is a Tim Tam?'

'What the Hell Is a Tim Tam?'

The Three Ps: Unabridged

The circumstances and coincidences of life often lead us down strange and circuitous routes as we travel on this journey. How well I remember, as a fledgling first year medical student, having a Schick test placed on my arm as part of a laboratory exercise in an immunology course. The results, a large slough on my forearm, indicated that I was susceptible to diphtheria. Little did I realize then the importance of that name, nor was I aware of his contributions to the definition of serum sickness and anaphylaxis. But even more removed from the realm of possibility was to have imagined that I would one day have the privilege of standing before this distinguished body to honor the memory of Dr. Bela Schick. As I began searching for information about Dr. Schick, my secretary pulled from the shelf in our own office library a volume, published by Schering, that contains the first five Bela Schick lectures. Dr. Murray Peshkin delivered the first Bela Schick lecture to this body in 1968, followed by Howard Rapaport, John McGovern, Jerome Glaser, and Susan Dees. Most of them knew Bela Schick and had worked under him or had been inspired by him. Dr. John McGovern who spoke in 1970 began with these words of Dr. Schick: “First, the patient, second, the patient, third, the patient, fourth the patient, fifth the patient, and then maybe comes science. We first do everything for the patient; science can wait, research can wait.”1 Dr. McGovern noted that these are strange words for a great scientist. They become much less strange when we recognize the fact that Dr. Schick was also a great humanitarian with a particular genius to combine these two cultures in medicine in perfect harmony. The title of this presentation is “The three Ps: Unabridged.” These Ps could represent pollens, pets, and pests or providers, payors, and politicians, but instead they represent the three most important elements in our lives and work: PATIENTS, PHYSICIANS, AND PROFESSION. The word unabridged, which means to be whole, complete, uncut, leaving nothing out, suggests to us the way in which we should approach the three Ps. I hope to develop this theme as it pertains to us and our acknowledgment of these most important areas.

Precis of Dividing Reality

What I call the Similarity Principle says that a (general) word ought to denote a class of things that are more similar to each other than to other things (DR, p. 36). closely related formulation, which I'll here take to be equivalent, is that a word ought to denote a class of things having something in common with each other that they don't have in common with other things. The Similarity Principle is an example of an intuitively rational constraint on the lexicon of a language. If we imagine such strange words as gricular (green or circular) or carple (car or apple), we feel intuitively that there would be something absurd about having such words in our language, and one explanation of this-indeed the explanation that is likely first to come to a person's mind in some rudimentary form-is that these words violate the Similarity Principle. My book is a study of rational constraints on lexicons, constraints like the Similarity Principle. The central problem of the book is to articulate and (especially) try to assess such constraints. I call this the division problem, for it is a problem about how words ought to divide up reality. Other putative constraints examined in the book have to do with projectibility, causality, natural properties and things, salience, important properties, and economy. The serious difficulty of the division problem emerges when we focus on examples in which ordinary words are replaced by words like gricular and carple in such a manner as to yield strange languages that have the same descriptive content as English; that is, any sentence in English is (a priori necessarily) equivalent to a sentence in the strange language, and vice versa. These languages strike us as intuitively absurd, but this seems to mean that there are lexical constraints with the puzzling effect of disqualifying languages in which we could say everything we ordinarily say (modulo equivalence). It is difficult to defend such constraints. This characterization of my project, I have found, is sometimes a philosophical turnoff. A study of rational constraints on lexicons? What's next,

Reply to Commentators

I would expect many readers of my book to want to agree with either Mark Heller or Alan Sidelle. The very idea of rational constraints on (sufficient to disqualify such words as gricular and carple) will immediately suggest to many people that either (a) the constraints are of a purely pragmatic nature (Heller) or (b) there really are no such constraints (Sidelle). I can take some cold comfort in the fact that many philosophers will join me (and Alan) in rejecting (a), and many others will join me (and Mark) in rejecting (b), but since I have nothing to offer in place of these positions-except mystification-I'm afraid that few will join me in rejecting both of them. Let me, however, not exaggerate my opposition to (a) and (b). As I explain in my reply to Sidelle, I don't mind people accepting (b), as long as they acknowledge the strong intuitions to the contrary. My opposition to (a) is more adamant, but even here, as I explain in my reply to Heller, I don't necessarily deny that there may be some trivial pragmatic complaints against the strange languages (see also DR, pp. 138, 141). What I don't think-nor, I take it, does Sidelle-is that there are any complaints of the serious nature Heller talks about. In any case, I continue to (ambivalently) believe on intuitive grounds, without being able to defend it, that there are metaphysically necessary constraints on lexicons which rule out the strange words at some deep level of language or thought. As for Peter Simons's response to my book, I have to conjecture that Peter is like the philosopher in the dialogue in my precis, the philosopher who cannot understand what it means to question the Similarity Principle. It does indeed appear to me that Peter and his gaseous Jovian friend George take the Similarity Principle for granted, without acknowledging it or seeing the need to defend it. I thank the discussants for their participation in this symposium, and I will now address each of their comments in some detail.

The Passion of Interpretation (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 132 Reviews for his two core chapters on the theological usage of rwh, these make a rather schematic impression; I would like to have seen more detailed study of concrete texts. Above all, however, I came away from reading Dreytza's study with no real sense as to what original insights about the theological use of rwlJ. his new approach to the subject is supposed to have generated. In this regard Dreytza's general conclusions are particularly disappointing. Those reiterate the findings of his individual chapters, but provide no indication as to where the study breaks new ground in our actual understanding of rwh in its theological usage. As frequently seems to happen then with works that tout the novelty and superiority of their methodologies, one is left wondering here precisely what Dreytza has achieved (or even what he thinks he has). There are a couple of rather serious typographical errors to be pointed out: several lines have been scrambled at the bottom of p. 195 and the top of p. 196, while on p. 216 four lines of text recur verbatim as n. 15. Christopher Begg Catholic University Washington, D.C. 20064 THE PASSION OF INTERPRETATION. By W. Dow Edgerton. Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation. pp. 160. Louisville: Westminsterl10hn Knox, 1992. Paper, $19.99. This book is not just about the passion of interpretation. It is itself a passionate exploration of the Interpretive enterprise. Rather than detailing and extending the more technical aspects of modem hermeneutics, Edgerton explores his subject by interpreting several texts himself. In each case he reads the text as itself an interpretation of the interpretive process. The result is an almost poetic picture of interpretation, yet one informed by modem hermeneutics and literary theory. Edgerton's texts are drawn from a wide variety of loci, from Greek literature to Jewish and Christian Scriptural texts, to some modem short stories. After a brief introduction, he begins in the second chapter by examining an ancient hymn to Hermes, noting that interpretation is "forever linked to his name through the strange word 'hermeneutics'" (p. 19). The hymn is about Hermes' theft of Apollo's cows and subsequent cover-up. But Edgerton sees more. He argues that, when seen as an allegory of the interpretive process, Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 133 Reviews this hymn accurately testifies to a crucial aspect of the interpretive process: that it is a "theft" of another's words representing itself as a repetition of those words. He concludes that, "Interpretation is thus a work of deception carried out by impostors in front of those who know that they are impostors but who are willing to be deceived. Why? For the sake of meaning" (p. 38). Thus interpretation begins not so much with a text, but with desire, and then proceeds with the resulting theft of words. Edgerton then moves in chap. 3 to a reading of the famous Talmudic text regarding the debate between Rabbi Eliezar and the sages regarding the Bat Ko! (B. Mes. 59b). This text is his entry into the communal aspect of interpretation . In particular, he argues that this passage, when read in its broader literary context, describes how every interpretation must stand up against a "judgment of tears," that is, how much the interpretation addresses or causes suffering in the broader community. In chap. 4, "The Exegesis of Echoes," Edgerton discusses how a text itself shapes interpretation. Here his focus text is Genesis 22, and in the latter portion of the chapter he shows how this text has elicited varying responses from interpreters over the ages, including Heb 11:17-19, the Midrash, Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, Wilfred Owen, a contemporary poet, Bobbie Groth, and Walter Brueggemann. In Edgerton's terms, Genesis 22 has "echoed" down the centuries as various interpreters have attempted to come to terms with it, filling in the story's gaps and occasionally attempting to master it by "binding" it to the story of Jesus' death and resurrection. Perhaps most of all, Edgerton's survey of interpretation of Genesis 22 demonstrates that it is the gaps of a story as much as its words which impact later readers. And this then is...

THE GREAT TSUNAMI

Tsunami? If that strange word doesn’t sound too familiar, join the club. It’s a foreign word, coined by the Japanese who live uneasily on that Pacific Rim of Fire where all kinds of earth movements are common. If a very strong earthquake for example, so disrupts the seabed, it may on rare occasion thrust the overlying water so sharply upward that a massive sea mount results on the ocean surface. Then that mountain dissipates in a tidal wave roaring outward in all directions. Such is a tsunami.

Metaphor, the Semasic Field, and Inexhaustibility

HE STANDARD VIEW is that metaphor, along with other figuration, is an aberration of language. In Hobbes's extreme but not idiosyncratic view, metaphor is use of words other sense than that they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others. For, truth is the right ordering of names in our affirmations.' In Locke's words, artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move passions, and thereby mislead judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.2 Aristotle is perhaps founder of standard view when he defines metaphor as a strange word: consists in giving thing a name that belongs to something else.3 Yet Aristotle also asserts that the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of in dissimilars. standard view of metaphor is based on four principles, each of which I claim is false: (1) Propositional or literal language is basic, primary, normal. A corollary is that literal language is independent of metaphor and other figuration. (2) Metaphors are deviant; they involve a change in meanings of words. (3) transformation of meaning in metaphor is dyadic: a shift of meaning from one word to another, noun to verb, noun to noun, and so forth. (4) Metaphor is an elliptical simile or analogy. Since asserted identity cannot be literal-for example, in The Church is a rock-it must be interpreted in terms of likenesses: similarity in dissimilars. Every one of these principles is false, and every theory of metaphor based on them is false. This includes virtually every theory known. Some well-known theories reject one or more of above principles, but none goes far enough.4 third principle is most vulnerable, and its rejection has been source of most alternative theories of metaphor. I will argue that an adequate theory requires abandonment of all above principles, especially view that metaphor is linguistic deviance.5 Figurative language is no aberration, but articulation of possibilities resident in all normal and complex lan-

Organ transplants and the principle of fairness.

The Report of the Massachusetts Task Force on Organ Transplantation can be described as an incunabulum. This strange word, properly referring to a book produced in the first decades of printing with movable type, literally means “in the cradle.” The Task Force document appears in the infancy of a discussion that is certain to grow: the public policy debate over the allocation of scarce resources. The debate was born several years ago, but until now has either been argued in general terms or by way of administrative devices. The Task Force addresses a quite particular issue: how to or whether to make available to the citizens of the Commonwealth and their neighbors the medical technology of organ transplantation. It approaches the problem with a vivid awareness of the expense of this technology as well as the constraints on health care resources and financing.

What If?

What If? Ruth Jane Roberts (bio) Rereading a favorite book is always a risk, and when the second reading occurs fifty years after the first, it is a particularly chancy action. "What if?" as the children ask. What if the years have brought changed tastes, new insights to the reader? What if the book has become dated by its author's perceptions and attitudes, his style? What if the memory of a sparkling experience turns into the dull reality of boredom? What if a friend (carefully pointing out [End Page 7] that the book and reader are exactly the same age) asks one to reread the favorite and comment on the experience? The book is The Story of Mankind (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921 [1972]) by Hendrik van Loon, which I first read in 1931. I was ten years old, in love with reading, and had just moved to a small town where I could (and did) visit the library every day. Miss Fowles, librarian, grew tired of checking my story books out one day and in the next; and finally, although she said it might be too hard for me, gave me The Story of Mankind. I kept that book a whole week. I expect it was too hard for me; surely it would be too hard for many of today's word-poor ten-year-olds. But what a challenge! What satisfaction when a new word was mastered! What sweet wonder when facts and ideas previously unknown were made clear to me! Rapture is not too strong a word—I was literally and literarily hooked. So it was with some reluctance that I promised my friend (who is half the age of the book) that I would read it again. Now, after re-reading it, I am pleased that I promised. No, of course there is not this time the same glow of discovery. Discovery in the ten-year-old's sense is a one-time event, and even the "new" parts of the book are within my memory. Yet in this reading too there is discovery. I discover in myself an awareness of the magnitude of van Loon's accomplishment. I discover (what if?) my taste has matured, my insights are more precise, and I can now more properly appreciate the overwhelming amount of material Dr. van Loon collected; I can look, awed, at his unerring choices of important people and events. I can recognize his bits of philosophy, understand his insistence on looking behind, before, on both sides of an event to see causes as well as effects. Most of all, I can now respond to his inimitable style with intellect as well as with emotion. Lucid is the adjective that comes to mind. While he often cleverly defines a new word in context, he never condescends to his reader. He says: Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use so many "big words." I wish that I could write this history in words of one syllable. But it cannot be done. You cannot write a text-book of geometry without reference to a hypotenuse and triangles and a rectangular parallelopiped [sic]. You simply have to learn what those words mean or do without mathematics. In history (and in all life) you will eventually be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now? (p. 221). Over and over van Loon uses fresh metaphors and similes to explain past situations in a modern manner. His prose moves—it runs hops, glides, marches, even soars. And always there is the excitement! I remember being particularly pleased with the definition of the Renaissance. "It was not," Dr. van Loon said, "a political or religious movement. It was a state of mind" (p. 206). Fascinating! I was impressed by his description of famous explorers such as Columbus and Magellan: They set their course by God and by guess. If luck was with them, they returned after one or two or three years. In the other case, their bleached bones remained behind on some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gambled with...

Sensation magnitude judgments are based upon estimates of physical magnitudes

After writing my response to the commentaries, I sat back and reflected on the fascination and frustration of work on this topic. There is the ancient fascination of trying to understand the nature of the sensory bridge linking us to the external world. Also, discussing the measurability of sensation brings to the surface concepts we use and take for granted when we are working in other areas of psychology; and it holds them before us for critical examination. The frustration lies chiefly in the difficulty of formulating concepts clearly, in a way understood by all. At least when constructing the original Tower of Babel, workers hearing strange words knew that communication was not occurring. The psychophysical Tower of Babel sometimes has workers using the same words, but with different meanings. Much of my response is based on attempts to clarify concepts and clear up confusions.

Growing up in Germany: After the War after Hitler "Afterwards"

After what? This question has had a key influence on my childhood and the process of my becoming an adult. My identity represents a patchwork of shocking experiences as a It is the product of a slow and tedious gathering of information about the mysterious behavior of the adults around me and also a product of the endless attempts to find a rational, political or social explanation for that behavior. I was born in Bonn in 1946 and grew up as the youngest of six children in a typical small town in central Germany. (It was so typical that in 1954 Renate Mayntz carried out a sociological study of this German Middletown.) Four of my brothers and sisters were born between the years 1929 and 1938, the fifth, a sister closest to me in age, in 1941. The first thing that she used to blame me for whenever we had our little fights was that she had not gotten to know my father well until she was five years old. Why did she blame me for this, and what did I have to do with it? From the beginning my parents used to call me the peace child. I was born exactly nine months after their first reunion following the war and the time of the concentration camps (Lagerzeit). But why did my sister blame me for these things, anyway? What war were they talking about and what was the meaning of this strange word Lagerzeit? These were questions and mysteries that were there from my earliest childhood; they started with sibling rivalry and became even more encompassing as I began to explore the problem in greater depth. And there certainly was a lot to discover, for starting with my earliest memories I and my family were somehow different. My father was a contractor. For the first 14 years we lived in a barrackslike building next to his old office. The large building which housed the business was surrounded by a wall and had a huge entrance gate for the trucks that was locked at night. My father had bars put in front of the windows, curliqued and very elegant, but bars nevertheless. What for? Other children didn't have to grow up in a fortress. My mother told me that years before the Gestapo had kept watch on the house and had overheard

In search of pure experience

In his 1963 reminiscence "My Way to Phenomenology" Martin Heidegger recalls his first encounter with Husserl's Logical Investigations in 1909. He speaks of "the spell emanating from the work" and says, "I remained so fascinated by Husserl's work that I read in it again and again in the years to follow without gaining sufficient insight into what fascinated me."1 These are strange words to use about a book on logic, and they suggest something ofthe paradox of Husserl's works and the remarkable influence they have had on the intellectual life ofthe twentieth century. In many ways Husserl was typical of the German academic specialist in philosophy. His focus seemed narrow and recondite, his vocabulary obscure and technical, his interests limited to his own field. If his researches had implications beyond the academy or even beyond academic philosophy, Husserl seemed to have little interest in showing those implications or in appealing to a wider public. "Popular" philosophy was not his style. He seemed sublimely oblivious to the intellectual currents that were swirling about him. Against the rising tide of historicism and relativism, he proclaimed the establishment of philosophy as "rigorous science." When his Ideas appeared in 1913 and he made it clear that the focus of his philosophy was to be "consciousness" and the "ego," he betrayed no awareness of what was being said on these subjects by another Austrian Jew, also trained in Vienna and a near contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Even within academic philosophy Husserl seemed to be something of a throwback: where philosophers after three centuries were still preoccupied with overcoming Descartes' philosophy of mind and the idealism that seemed to flow from it, Husserl appeared both to embrace idealism and to base his philosophical approach on a return to Cartesian principles.