Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:literalism

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 16:25:47 -0400

At 02:38 PM 10/20/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>lojbab:
><<A sky-scraper on the other hand does not in fact guska anything, and people
>seem to feel that in particular the final term of the tanru used in lujvo
>making out to apply literally. A metaphor at least as good would be
>"penis-building" - at least we know it's a building of some kind.>>
>Actually, skyscrapers scrape the sky -- they just don't leave marks (see also
>airplanes). Okay, they literally scrape the wind, but that is less
>appealing.

And is a wind-scraper something that scrapes the wind, or something that 
uses the wind to scrape (i.e. wind erosion)

>Sorry, but "penis building" doesn't work -- except in very
>delusive male imaginations -- for things above say 30 stories.

I was referring to the general erectile phallic shape - you know, 
non-literal metaphor and all that. I also once heard a feminist writing 
that said that tall buildings were phallic so it came to mind when I was 
try to think of a metaphoric way to describe just what kind of building a 
very tall one is other than "very tall". Maybe I should have said 
penis-shape-building, but that is moving towards literalism.

> is as
>important as literality. And what is special about the last place? Its a
>good rule for fu'ivla, where we haven't a clue, but why here where we have?

I'm not sure, but it seems to be far more important to the literalists than 
any others, possibly because the source metaphor would have its place 
structure determined by the final term, so that if one tries to figure out 
what a word means from context, you can understand the sentence more or 
less even if you don't exactly know what the word means.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org