Sunday, 18 Nov

Norman, Richard. “Holy Communion.” Eurozine [First published in New Humanist 6/2007].

Discusses New Wave Atheism and how it is aggressively antagonistic to religion, which is the wrong way to proceed. I most certainly agree with this.

When recent books by Dawkins, Hitchens and others began coming out I was excited at first. It was good to see that intellectuals were once again engaging with the issues of the day. But as soon as the reviews started appearing I was more appalled than anything. The overly simplistic argumentation, the selective choice of examples, and the tack taken was wrong, for many reasons.

I am what many would call an atheist. I much prefer the term agnostic, though, as that is the best I can epistemologically claim. If you like, I have faith that there is no god (or gods), except those which we create in our own likeness. But I cannot know this.

Whatever our beliefs, be they atheism, humanism, Hinduism, Catholicism, some form of Protestantism, Islamism, etc., we are all in the same boat. Many of us have the same beliefs and goals about how others ought to be treated or how the world could be. We need to work together toward these. Clearly, there are differences between people and groups of people, but aggressive differentiation serves no useful purpose.

Hjørland, Birger and Jeppe Nicolaisen. “Bradford’s Law of Scattering: Ambiguities in the Concept of “Subject.” In F. Crestani and I. Ruthven (Eds.). CoLIS 2005: Context: Nature, Impact, and Role; Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3507: 96-105.

Hjørland, Birger. “Towards a Theory of Aboutness, Subject, Topicality, Theme, Domain, Field, Content . . . and Relevance.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52.9 (2001): 774-778.

Sunday – Tuesday, 18 – 20 Nov

Hjørland, Birger. Information Seeking and Subject Representation: An Activity-theoretical Approach to Information Science. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997.

• Ch. 4: The Concept of Subject or Subject Matter and Basic Epistemological Positions

Monday, 19 Nov

Harris, Roy. The Language Connection: Philosophy and Linguistics. Bristol, U.K: Thoemmes Press, 1996. [Re-reading]

• Ch. 8: Metalinguistic Improvements
• Ch. 9: Metalinguistic Mistakes
• Ch. 10: Metalinguistic Illusions

Monday – Tuesday, 19 – 20 Nov

Hjorland, Birger. “Information Retrieval, Text Composition, and Semantics.” Knowledge Organization 25.1/2 (1998): 16-31.

Argues for a broader—and different—view of semantics within LIS. Primarily contrasts Wittgenstein’s early “picture theory” with his later “theory of language games,” but has several useful touchpoints for shifting to a more integrationist theory.

Tuesday, 20 Nov

Harris, Roy. The Language Connection: Philosophy and Linguistics. Bristol, U.K: Thoemmes Press, 1996.

• Postscript

Tallis, Raymond. Escape from Eden. New Humanist 118(4), Nov/Dec 2003. Found via The End of Cyberspace blog.

I know what I said—and I stand by it—about link posts but I’ve gotten more interesting links from Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s link posts than everyone else combined.

By the way librarians, have you seen his post from 17 Nov, “Libraries as space 2.0…and early indicators of social IT trends?” He ends with the following:

But if I’m not mistaken, librarians started talking about information commons around 2001– well before Friendster, LinkedIn, and all the rest of Web 2.0 happened. I wonder what librarians are talking about these days?

Perhaps some of you can help him out with that question.

From the Tallis article which is a discussion of how it is that humans are more than just the animals that we are.

Criticising the language of the biologisers is not, however, enough. Defenders of human exceptionalism must, given our undoubted biological origins, find a ‘biological’ basis for our unique escape from biology and a ‘biological’ explanation of how we acquired the ability to run our lives — as opposed to being run by genes that happen to delude us into believing that we are running our lives. Given the relative triviality of the genotypical and phenotypical differences between ourselves and our closest primate cousins, this may seem a tall order.

Harris, Roy. Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games with Words. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

• Ch. 1: Texts and Contexts (Tue)
• Ch. 2: Names and Nomenclatures (Tue-Wed)
• Ch. 3: Linguistic Units (Thu)
• Ch. 4: Language and Thought (Fri AM)
• Ch. 5: Systems and Users (Fri)
• Ch. 6: Arbitrariness (Fri)
• Ch. 7: Grammar (Sat)
• Ch. 8: Variation and Change (Sat)
• Ch. 9: Communication (Sat)
• Ch. 10: Language and Science (Sat)

Despite the differences between Saussure’s and Wittgenstein’s later thoughts on language they are remarkably similar. In this book, Harris explicates the games analogy that both used.

Saturday, 24 Nov

Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1987.

• Ch. 1: Introduction.
• Ch. 2: The rationalistic tradition.
• Ch. 3: Understanding and Being.
• Ch. 4: Cognition as a biological phenomenon.

[Disclaimer: I do not mean to offend anyone's personal views. My only aim here is to share a love of word play with others who may also appreciate it.]

Earlier this week I did the copy cataloging to enter this book into our library. I found the juxtaposition of the the title and the subject heading quite humorous.

Murphy, Francesca Aran. God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited.
LCSH: Narrative theology.

Truth be told, the book looks highly interesting to a heretic such as me, and the subject clearly matches the title because the book is (based on my reading a fair amount of the intro) a reaction to a “side-effect” of narrative theology, which argues that

the Church’s use of the Bible should focus on a narrative presentation of the faith, rather than on the exclusive development of a systematic theology.

The intro to the book explains it better than the Wikipedia article, but it seems that (and it makes sense that) a side-effect of focusing on story is that the view, intentional or otherwise, that ‘God is story’ arises. That’s is in the existential sense. Does seem to be a distinct possibility.

Anyway, based on my reading of Auerbach’s Mimesis I imagine that if I was a theologian I would be highly drawn to narrative theology. It is the story of the Bible that is important. But Murphy’s objection is easy enough to see as a definite issue within narrative theology.

Nonetheless, heathen word play lover that I am, God is Not a Story == Narrative theology cracks me up.

Sunday, 15 April 2007

The first 3 items are from my Bloglines backlog and are all also from the wonderful 3 Quarks Daily.

Smith, Justin E. H. “Selected minor works: Where’s the philosophy?” 8 May 2006

This is absolutely brilliant and if I start quoting it I’ll just have to reproduce the whole thing. So just go read it! It is brilliant and hilarious.

Now that I am a tenured professor of philosophy, and thus may resign from service in my profession’s pep squad without fear of losing my salary, I’m going to come right out and say it: after all this time as a student, and then as a graduate student, and then as a professor of philosophy, I still have absolutely no idea what philosophy is, and therefore what it is I am supposed to be doing.

…

There’s formal logic, but if I agree with Heidegger on anything it is that logic, like shortpants, is for schoolboys. In the good old days, when one learned anything at all at school, one learned the forms of argumentation, the fallacies together with their Latin names, etc. This is all really just advanced critical thinking, and if I can see that q follows from p on a symbol-dense page, I still don’t believe that counts as knowing anything. As Wittgenstein said, everything is left the same.

…

But Richard Rorty is at least right to say that what philosophy departments offer fails largely to live up to the sense that newcomers have that the discipline ought to be doing something rather more, well, important.

Bravo! [And, yes, I realize that I just contradicted myself.]

Huber-Dyson, Verena. “Gödel in a nutshell.” Edge 14 May 2006. At 3QD 19 May 2006.

This is a very short piece.

The essence of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is that you cannot have both completeness and consistency. A bold anthropomorphic conclusion is that there are three types of people; those that must have answers to everything; those that panic in the face of inconsistencies; and those that plod along taking the gaps of incompleteness as well as the clashes of inconsistencies in stride if they notice them at all, or else they succumb to the tragedy of the human condition.

Harpham, Geoffrey. “Science and the theft of humanity.” American Scientist Online July-August 2006. At 3QD 9 July 2006.

Medium length article detailing the fall of the integrated thinker with the rise of the Modern university, the segregation of the disciplines, the beginning reintegration with the rise of interdisciplinarity, and the recent “plunder” of the humanities by the sciences.

Humanists, who have been only partially aware of the work being done by scientists and other nonhumanists on their own most fundamental concepts, must try to overcome their disciplinary and temperamental resistances and welcome these developments as offering a new grounding for their own work. They must commit themselves to be not just spectators marveling at new miracles, but coinvestigators of these miracles, synthesizing, weighing, judging and translating into the vernacular so that new ideas can enter public discourse.

They—we—must understand that while scientists are indeed poaching our concepts, poaching in general is one of the ways in which disciplines are reinvigorated, and this particular act of thievery is nothing less than the primary driver of the transformation of knowledge today. For their part, those investigating the human condition from a nonhumanistic perspective must accept the contributions of humanists, who have a deep and abiding stake in all knowledge related to the question of the human.

Guarino, Nicola and Christopher Welty. “Identity and subsumption.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 111-126.

This is an interesting but difficult article, heavy on logic. Builds on the philosophical notions of identity, unity, and essence and the constraints they impose on the subsumption relationship (so-called is-a relationship) in the service of building “simpler, cleaner, and ultimately more reusable taxonomies” (124).

Sunday – Monday, 15 -16 April 2007

Green, Rebecca. “Internally-structured conceptual models in cognitive semantics.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 73-89.

Delivers a highly readable account of the basic cognitive semantic phenomena within cognitive semantics and establishes the prevalence of internal structure at all conceptual levels. Image schemata, basic level concepts, and frames are lucidly explained before moving on to mappings between these phenomena—metonymy, metaphor and blended spaces.

Highly recommended.

Wednesday, 18 April 2007

Khoo, Christopher, Syin Chan and Yun Niu. “The many facets of the cause-effect relationship.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 51-70.

Provides an overview of the cause-effect relation from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology and linguistics. Focuses on causal inference in text comprehension by looking at explicit expressions of causation (causal links, causative verbs, resultative constructions, conditionals, and causative adverbs, adjectives and prepositions) and implicit causal attribution of verbs. Also considers types of causation and roles in causal situations.

Recommended.

Tuesday – Saturday, 17 – 21 Apr 2007

IFLA. Functional Requirements for Authority Data: A Conceptual Model (Draft), 2007-04-01

Am most of the way through it; may finish it today. It looks like Kathryn and I (and perhaps Allen) will be leading a discussion on it for Metadata Roundtable in June or early July before comments are due.

Wednesday – Friday, 18 – 20 Apr 2007

Baggini, Julian. Atheism. A Very Short Introduction (series). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Read the 1st 2 chapters before and after the Andrew Bird show. Finished reading it Thursday and Friday during lunch.

Excellently written and argued. I only had one real issue.

On page 69, in a section on Death in the chapter on Meaning and purpose, Baggini writes:

Take the idea that life can only have a meaning if it never ends. It is certainly not the case that in general only endless activities can be meaningful. Indeed, usually the contrary is true: there being some end or completion is often required for an activity to have any meaning. A football match, for example, gains its purpose only because it finishes after 90 minutes and there is a result. An endless football match would be as meaningless as a kick around the park. Plays, novels, films, and other forms of narrative also require some kind of completion. When we study we follow courses that end at a determinative point and don’t go on forever. Take virtually any human activity and you find that some kind of closure or completion is required to make them meaningful (emphasis mine).

I understand the point he is trying to make and, in general, I agree with him. Also, part of the problem is that he never defines “meaning,” although he does define “meaning of life.”

But I still say WTF? Depending on the level of play, and perhaps other factors, a football match may very well serve a purpose (and this have meaning) whether or not it ends in 90 minutes. It may end early due to an injury or weather (non-pro), and does any game that goes into overtime not have a purpose?

And his equating a “kick around the park”—in essence, play—as meaningless is unconscionable. I get so very tired of bright—and not so bright—people claiming play serves no purpose and/or is meaningless! It may, in fact, be one of the highest forms of meaning attainable by humans.

And as for study always ending at a determinative point (at least to have any meaning), well, I imagine many of you can just about guess at the apoplectic fit that brought on.

Please realize that I am being particularly harsh on Baggini over this paragraph. This is a lovely little book that is overall quite well argued, despite the shortcomings of this paragraph. It is a wonderful read for the atheist, the agnostic and the religious. It is not dogmatic in any sense. He detests fundamentalism in any form.

Very highly recommended.

You won’t often find me linking to internet video because I don’t watch much of it. But if it were all this funny—luckily it’s not—I’d get no work done at all.

This is some of the absolutely funniest stuff I’ve ever seen in my life. “Swear by mr.deity.”

To my friends who don’t appreciate religious humor, well, don’t watch it.

mr.deity

I think Episode 7 (Mr. Deity & the Tour de Hell) may be my favorite, although they all have moments of brilliance. All I’m saying is adulterers deserve the Hokey Pokey.

There’s even a free podcast available via the iTunes store or a RSS feed available.

Check it out. Absolutely brilliant!

Originally found at sivacracy.net

I have been watching a couple movies during this break. Maybe I could be doing more productive things, but my mind also needs a break, time to do some leisurely processing in the background. So movies it is.

I have mentioned some of them already, but would like to flesh them out with wsome mini-reviews.

Friday, I watched Steamboy. It was OK, but ambivalent on “science” in the end. [Should rightly be applied science and, thus, technology, though. The movie referred to it as "science."] Set mostly in England, and particularly London during the Great Exhibition of 1851—Crystal Palace and all—steam was king and “science” was ascendant. Science was portrayed as the means of helping humanity or as a highly dangerous way to make more powerful and efficient weapons of war to be sold to the highest bidders. The latter way was winning. Motives in the movie were rarely this simplistic, but this simplistic dichotomy was nonetheless explicitly set up for the”purpose” of science. It was an entertaining movie, well done in many ways; I just feel cheated by its vague and simplistic stand on one of the supreme (and complex) moral issues of all of human history.

Sunday, I watched The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. This was a good, but odd movie. I’m not sure what I felt about this movie; may have to watch it again some day. It is very complex morally. In the end, it is hard to embrace any of the characters. In this sense, it is a vastly human movie. I do not necessarily require “clean and tidy” movies, but this one seemed to be pushing at the edges of “clean and tidy” for me. But then life is rarely clean and tidy, either.

Kingdom of Heaven was watched over Sunday and Monday. While a visually lush movie (Ridley Scott), this just did not resonate much with me. There is a fair amount of character development, and almost everyone learns some hard lessons, but they do little for the characters or the film, in the end. I did find the premise interesting, and it’s a timely topic. I just wanted more. Maybe it was supposed to be representative of the time and not judge that time morally, but we need nuanced discussion and views in these matters today and not simply lush, big budget, films that have no real statement to make. Yes, it seems I am expecting too much of mass entertainment.

Monday I watched Adaptation. I really don’t know what to say about this one. Not really very good, nor recommended.

I watched Paradise Now on Tuesday. My comments are at the LibraryTavern post that caused me to put it on my list, assuming Liz approves my comment. Recommended, but (for me) lacking.

Word Wars (Scrabble) is a pretty good documentary, but knowing words just as objects and combinations of specific numbers of letters on lists is a seriously bad “word issue” to have, IMHO. I’ve enjoyed some Scrabble in my day, but that is a wrong reason (and way) to know words. It seems to me that that would be (is) a good use of computing technology; we humans ought to know words in the sense that computers cannot. The people in this movie are all characters, full of real quirks, predilections, and motives. I watched this Wednesday.

After Word Wars, I watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had already seen this but wanted some mindless entertainment for one of my movie slots where I wasn’t prepared to really concentrate. Not really a good movie at all, but it has its moments. Really, read the books, or any other format in which you prefer some version of the story.

Yesterday, I watched Junebug, Sirens, and Napoleon Dynamite. I feel that all of these were oversold to me, but in vastly different ways. They weren’t bad movies, and for what I paid were worth it, but … I got nothing else either.

Still to watch:

Maria Full of Grace. I need to watch this today so I can return it before 9 PM.

Spellbound (1999 National Spelling Bee). More folks with word issues. I have until tomorrow for this one.

Found at The Itinerant Librarian.

Reasonably accurate I guess, but based on just a few questions, some of which had no good answer for me. I assume I answered one question slightly different than Angel, since our scores are so close. But, that I expected.

[Title courtesy of CSNY]

I had some wonderful discussions with my daughter today.  Issues she is having with her mother came up and, thus, we got into parenting.  Seems Mary (the ex) is sorry about some of the things we did or did not do as parents. 

With Sara graduating from college soon and entering "the real world" (her term, not mine.  I used to use it, but no more.) we talked a bit about her losing the support of her friends; the people she has relied on the most over the last 4 years.  She brought up how she is a bit scared of losing this support group, but that one thing she has learned is that she is good at quickly making friends, so she can deal with it.

I mentioned that the frequent moving was one of my parental concerns over the years, but that I had always consoled myself (and tried to console Mary) that it made the kids good at quickly making friends, and learning that often in life the "good ones" do move on. 

See, Mary grew up in the same house until she graduated from high school and left to become "surrogate" mom to her eldest brother’s 3 kids at the ripe age of 18.  I moved a few times as a kid, but the main formative years were spent in one location.  Either way, we both grew up in safe, secure neighborhoods surrounded by people who would look out for us in one manner or another.  We were able to roam reasonably freely and widely, and got the lay of the land for miles around.  It was a very stable and steady influence.  My kids did not have that in any sense.  Mary and I often worried about the effects of constant moving on them, considering that our childhood and adolescence were vastly different.

This discussion with my "baby" girl really heartened me.  She is happy with what she learned from the frequent moving.  She does not regret that she did not have a (geographically) steady life.  She had plenty of close friends who did, and they often discuss such things.  She figures why regret what she didn’t have since she can’t even begin to imagine what that would have been like. 

Both of the kids learned to make friends quickly and, often, deeply.  They have learned to value those friendships no matter how long they may have together (geographically).  Another thing they both, thankfully, learned was to be good judges of character.  Making deep friendships quickly with the wrong sorts, which was an equally plausible outcome, would not have been a good.  But we all got lucky on that one, I guess.

Sara and I discussed a few other things about what Mary and I did "right" and "wrong" in our child-rearing.  The main thing was that Sara is generally happy with what we managed to do despite ourselves (my words, not hers).  Have I ever mentioned how much I love this kid, and how very, very proud I am of her?

One thing that came up, due to one of Mary’s regret, is her (Sara’s) religious upbringing or, more accurately, lack thereof.  Mary was raised Catholic, but wasn’t really practicing when I met her.  I was raised Southern Baptist and have been agnostic since long before I met Mary.  So we just kind of avoided any specific religious "training" of our children.  We figured they could choose when they were ready.  We were happy to let them go to church with friends, and so on. 

Sara’s regret is definitely not that we didn’t indoctrinate her into some belief, but that we didn’t give her a broader cultural understanding of various religions.  Her most critical "complaint" is that she has no cultural grounding in the literature of the Bible.  She does not get cultural Biblical references.  Her other "complaint" was that being at a school with many, and having many friends who are, Jews she knew nothing about Judaism.

Now, I agreed with her that on this count we "failed" her.  I couldn’t have fully done so back then.  But, and Sara does realize this, we were in no good position to provide that sort of education.  What the heck did white, middle class, Midwestern  kids who were born around 1960 know about Judaism?  Other than over 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, we had no cultural or societal references.  I don’t know about Mary, but if I knew any Jewish folks I did not know it.  I certainly did not know any practicing Jews.  Nor did I see them in my neighborhood or schools.

As for the Bible and cultural references, well, I was not in the right place mentally, nor was I properly educated at the time, to realize the vast amount of Biblical cultural references, nor to respect the Bible for the great literature that it is.  Heck, as recently as my divorce (1999) I still did not.  But I quickly "got religion" as they say.  I got a Bible or 2 in the divorce and immediately donated them to the library. Or maybe I threw them away.  I honestly don’t remember. 

But after a few years at an institution of higher learning and embarking on a quality liberal arts education I came to realize the value of the Bible as a reference source and as the great literature and guide to living that it is.  I also learned some honest history of its coming to be, which further cemented its value on those counts into my mind while simultaneously cementing the belief that it cannot be the word of God.  I quickly rectified the lapse in my collection and bought a good (used) KJV Bible complete with concordance.   And it gets used on occasion.  I would also, someday, like to re-read much of it as the great literature that it is. 

[On a side note, related to my comments on surveys from Tues night, I recently saw a survey from some Christian organization that was basing claims on how overwhelmingly Christian the US is based on the number of Bibles owned.  What a completely stupid claim!  Anyone who tried to imply anything based on my owning a Bible, other than that I own a Bible, is a complete moron.  The fact that I do reflects absolutely nothing about my religion, my religiosity, my spirituality, or anything else, other than I own one.  It would be like claiming that anyone who owns Marx is a communist, or that anyone who owns Mein Kampf is a nazi.  Simply ridiculous!  Oh, yeah.  Idiots do make those claims though.  <sigh>  An interesting thought, though, is that it is often the same sort of people making those claims who want to make claims based on my owning a Bible.  Hmmm!]

Anyway, we were not prepared in many ways to give our children the broad cultural education in religion that they deserved.  Now, Sara has rectified some of that on her own.  She took a comparative religion class in college, and she took at least one class in Japanese religions, or maybe just Shintoism.  But I do feel the pain of failure in her lack of cultural references to the Bible.  She does realize that she does have some control in that she could, and should, invest the time to read it on her own.

So, all in all, I left with my heart singing after talking with my beloved daughter today.  We mostly did OK, even better than OK.  She is an incredible young adult and I could not be more proud of her.  By the way, for many, many years I gave all child-rearing credit to Mary.  She was, thankfully, a stay-at-home mom and she did an incredible job!  I still give her much credit, but I now [and my children make sure of it] take some of the credit.

Sara is confident.  But not in some stupid "false confidence" [see my comments here] that is claimed for the rest of her generation.  Yes, she and her older brother were much more constricted than their mother and I were.  Yes, they had bike helmets….  But they were both challenged.  They both were in gifted programs.  They took AP classes and tests.  They were challenged.  They DID NOT get gold stars because ALL the kids did.  They were taught to challenge themselves, and they learned that failure, sometimes deep and painful and possibly with serious consequences, happens to us all when we chase our dreams, or even just the object of our immediate attention. 

Neither she, nor her brother, are some stupid list of what their generation supposedly is.  In some ways, yes.  In many ways, not at all.  And some of those yeses, well, you need to know their history because it matters.  All that crap about growing up completely wired, playing games, blah blah.  Yes, they both play video games, now.  But neither one of them started playing these games until late in high school.  And so on.

Is there any question as to why I get so offended by all of the pop sociology that passes for gen-gens?  [Thanks again, Walt!  By the way, did you take it out of your post?  I wanted to link for attributional purposes but I couldn't find it, even with Ctrl-F.]  ["Gen-gens, generational generalizations.  Walt Crawford.]

And lest anyone wonder, I so very deeply love, and am proud to the depths of my soul of, my son.  But for vastly different reasons.  And while my daughter and I may be at the top of our relationship "game," and my son and I may be near the bottom (but recovering) of ours, that has absolutely no effect on how much I love, or am proud of, him.  I only wish he’d believe that.  Or maybe I should say feel it.  I know all about the disconnect between knowing, believing and feeling [See very end of post.].  They all have their places, but often in personal relationships the feeling is vastly more important.  Hopefully all three are present simultaneously, but if I had to choose one, sign me up for the emotion.

Who could have guessed that the hour and a half spent with my daughter could have mattered so much.  For once that stupid phrase, "quality time", also part of her and her brother’s generations, actually meant something.  Quality time indeed!  And now I’m sitting here in a bar trying not to cry, but not really caring if I do.  Sometimes my heart simply breaks from the sheer amount of love I have for (adult) children.

Hehehe.  Now I’m really cracking up!  I’m about to write a post about how "The Fall of Man" led to dinosaurs becoming carnivores but first I check my stats and what do I find?  Someone found a post of mine with a misspelling of ‘apple’ so I go to fix it and what is it called?  Eating apples? 

Mmm…apples…Fall of Man.  My life doesn’t get any tastier or funnier than some of the strange synchronicities that crop up.

As a budding cataloger I follow AUTOCAT.  It is frequently enlightening, often educational, sometimes boring, and more often than you might think it is downright entertaining.

Lately there has been a thread about how to classify the book, Dinosaurs by Design by Duane T. Gish, et al. [Or for those who prefer the Amazon version so they can see the cover and read the crazy reviews.]  Actually, I’m not really sure why it’s coming up now as it was published in 1992.  Maybe it’s been reissued with all the new ‘interest’ in intelligent design?

Anyway….  The thread has been all of the above, except boring.  But today it got downright hysterical.  And I am not picking on what the poster said here, but on the book’s ideas.  A lot of comments got tossed around although most people had never seen the book, but today we finally got a description of the content:

The book explained such things as:  1) How the biblical "Fall of Man" (i.e., the first sin that was committed in the Garden of Eden) caused most dinosaurs to become carnivorous (according to this book, all dinosaurs were herbivorous prior to the Fall).

This shit even made my Mom laugh on her birthday!  Happy Birthday Mom!  There is far more by the way, but seeing as I shouldn’t cite without permission I’ll leave it at that.  Suffice it to say—fire-breathing dragons, dinosaurs on Noah’s ark, and man’s sin caused those poor innocent herbivorous dinosaurs to become nasty evil meat-eaters—I have got to get my hands on this book.  Matter-of-fact, I’m predicting the circulation of this little gem is going to go way up as catalogers all over the nation have to take a look at it now.  I hear it has great pictures too!

OK, if you are religious then I apologize if I offend you hereafter.  But, personally, I find the concepts of "The Fall of Man" and of "Original Sin" to be utterly absurd.  And yes, I’ve read just enough Kierkegaard to know that the absurd bit might ought to be enough to make me sit up and take notice.  But, nah.

And yes, I was born and bred a dutiful little Christian and have even been born again, as they say.  But that was a long time ago and I’m still no younger.  But you see, since then I’ve seen some of the world, done a little reading and learning on my own, learned some of the history of the church and of the Bible, learned a little history period.  And I am sorry, but I see little of the Christian God in the Old Testament and certainly not in that ridiculous concept of orginal sin.  In fact, I see little of the Christian God anywhere in the world, but that could simply be humankind’s fault and not God’s.  But no matter, it still doesn’t square.  In so many ways it doesn’t square.

Now I have no problems with Christians.  Some of my best friends and family are Christians.  But I have a massive problem with most people who go about their life like everything’s fine in the world and know that they are saved because their aesthetic appreciation of Christianity tells them they are fine.  In the meantime they support some of the most evil people doing some of the most evil things ever done in the name of God and capitalism. And that, my friends, is a pretty big list to top.

Me.  I’ll just keep eating apples.  Pray for my soul if you like.  But I’d prefer it if we all actually act as if our souls mattered.  All souls.

i did not design this game
i did not name the stakes
i just happen to like apples
and i am not afraid of snakes

Ani DiFranco.  "ADAM AND EVE."  DILATE.

Hehehe.  Fall of Man causes dinosaurs to become evil meat-eaters.  Can it get any funnier?

You fit in with: HumanismYour ideals mostly resemble that of a Humanist. Although you do not have a lot of faith, you are devoted to making this world better, in the short time that you have to live. Humanists do not generally believe in an afterlife, and therefore, are committed to making the world a better place for themselves and future generations. 20% scientific. 40% reason-oriented.

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Found via Angel

What other answer could there be when attending a library history conference on the effects of war, revolution and social change on libraries?

It looks like I struck out on a ‘definitive’ (pun intended) explication of ‘confessor.’

It seems that ‘confessor’ is used for both the one confessing, as in the normal use of the -or in English, and as the one, usually a priest, to whom confession is made.  I discovered this Sunday evening when I was replying to a comment by Angel at my "Librarianship as Penance?" post.  What, I asked, is up with that?

My initial foray for an answer is at my post, "Dictionary Day, now this is a holiday that I can get behind."  Feel free to take a look, I’ll wait.  I initially looked in the OED online to verify that it was used in both ways.  I looked at etymologies, first uses (descriptive), and spellings.  Unless I’m missing something in some Latin tense that isn’t fully explained, I don’t see why it is used both ways.

So Wednesday I hit the main reference room, the LIS Library, the Modern Languages Library, and then the History and Philosophy (Religion) Library.

But first, here is what I found in the main reference room.  I began with verifying what I found in the online OED with the print version.  I decided to check ‘confessee’ and discovered the following:

confessee  rare.  [f. CONFESS v. + -EE]
a. One who is confessed (by a priest).    b. One to whom confession is made.  (Ambiguous and to be avoided.)
[OK, do they mean these uses are ambiguous, or their definition is, or both?]

1601 F. GODWIN Bps. Eng. 377 Either the Confessor, or the Confessee, or the reporter, lied I doubt not. 1839 J. ROGERS Antipopopr. xiv. §1. 305 Confessor and confitent, or rather confessee and confesser commonly in private.

confesser  [f. CONFESS v. + -ER]  One who confesses or makes confession.

1836-46 in SMART Walker’s Dict. 1839 [see prec.].
[Again, kind of ambiguous.]

I then looked in:

Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed.  Rev. Walter W. Skeat.   Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1898

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.  C.T. Onions, ed.  Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1966

Origins: a Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 4th ed.  Eric Partridge  New York : Macmillan, 1966

confess, confession, confessional (adj., n), confessor.
‘To confess‘ derives, via OF-F, from LL confessāre, from L confess-, s of confessus, pp of confitēri, to confess,…

confessor, adopted by OF (whence the F confesseur), passes into E.

OF Old French / F French / LL Late Latin (c A.D. 180-600) / L Latin / s stem / pp past participle

Suffixes and Other Word-Final Elements of English  Laurence Urdang, ed.  Detroit, MI : Gale Research Company, 1982

1273 -or  A noun-forming word-final element, derived through Middle English -or, -our and Old French -eor, -eur from the Latin agentive suffix -or, -ator, used to denote ‘a person or thing that performs and action’ specified by the combining root: councillor, sailor, elevator.  Related forms: -ors (plural).

1274  -or  A noun-forming word-final element, derived through Middle English -or, -our and Old French -eor, -eur from the Latin abstract-noun-forming suffix -or, used in combinations denoting ‘an action, state, condition, result, quality, or characteristic’ specified by the combining root: labor, candor, misdemeanor.  Also, -our (British). Related forms: -ors (plural). [I don't think this applies here, but wanted to be inclusive.]

I also looked in several other "standard" unabridged dictionaries.  None gave me any insight.  So I headed off to the LIS Library to ask my friends their recommendations on which "experts" to go bug.  I went on my merry way to the English Library but decided to bypass it based on staffing and headed to the Modern Languages Library.  There I talked with a nice gentleman librarian with some sort of British Empire accent.  We decided that I had tried all of the standard routes and that it is probably some combination of my two theses (I’m getting there!) or in other words, an accident of language.  He suggested I go talk to the religious folks over in History and Philosophy so off I trundled.  Luckily, all of these libraries are in the Main Library Building.  A staffer there helped me but did much of the same sort of work I had already done, although I’m happy to let someone verify I’m not missing something obvious or even not so obvious.  Again, we decided on some sort of sociological, accident of language answer.

This is not the answer I want.  But seeing as it is human language, there may well be no "definitive" answer.

But before I give you my "answers," if anyone has any other ideas or, better yet, "the answer," please feel free to let me know.  Also, if anyone can think of any other words in English that use the same word form of the -ee and -or family to designate the doer and recipient of an action, please let me know.

I am (currently) left with a sociological/accident of language answer, for which I have no real evidence.  So, yes, I’m guessing.

The earliest sense in English per the OED, is "One who avows his religion in the face of danger, and adheres to it under persecution and torture, but does not suffer martyrdom; spec. one who has been recognized by the church in this character."  The first recorded use of this sense, is c1000.  This is also the first English usage.  King Edward the Confessor fits this sense.

Then, (prior to) a1300 we get the first usage of the more general sense of "One who makes confession or public acknowledgement or avowal of anything" (OED).

And then in 1340 we get this use, "One who hears confessions: a priest who hears confession of sin, prescribes penance, and grants absolution; the private spiritual director of a king or other great personage" and this note, from the OED:  [In med.L. better confessarius; but confessor in this sense is quoted by Du Cange from Walafrid Strabo (ob. 849).]

That note may be the one clue that I (or the others I consulted) am unable to interpret.

So my first idea is that both uses come from different word forms in Latin.  The first use had a few hundred years to make its way from Latin to Late Latin to Old French and Middle English and get vernacularized from the more narrow technical meaning to the more general meaning.  Then the Church decided to use another but related Latin word form, to which they were theoretically much closer as Latin scholars, which ended up as "the same word," or word form, in English and French.  Accident of history.

My second idea is that the Church decided 300+ years later to use the same technical word to also refer to the one confessed to.  The Church was still fairly strong in the 1300s and could well have imposed a 2nd use of the word on the faithful.  Sociological explanation.

And that, my friends, is the best I’ve been able to come up with for now.