This, that, & t’other (XXIV)

Reaching at random  into the hit-list pickle-jar,  I grab out a handful   of gemixte pickles:

He is respectful of the democratic ideal, as well as the mystical intuition behind it;  but polemicizes  over and over  against a tin idol in the hands of the practical democrat, “Majority Rule” (or, as he often puts it, the whim of the plurality or protority, since that’s all you need to win a multiply-contested election).

Young Martian lands on Terra, plays Schubert to perfection.   Earthlings to be recycled for their amino acids.

The view I am arguing  is that the most “creative” mathematician  is nothing like a playwright, he’s really just a stage hand, pulling back the curtain.  If we’d *dreamt up* Hilbert space, rather than *discovered*it, -- who’d give a sh*t?

This semantic sleight-of-hand represents a terminological land-grab.  It is one of those coinages that, purporting to be just one referential lexeme among others, from the outset  tilts the field of the debate:  “illegal alien”, “statutory rape”, “No Child Left Behind”.  

Notoriously, the world of haute couture is in the hands of paraphiliacs.  In itself  this is of little moment, since it is its own hothouse subculture, far from the lives of the ordinary working woman -- she, that is, that lets the sun shine on the world, while the night-creatures writhe in the shadows. 

Using this yardstick  and working backwards in time, we can conclude that, in Colonial days, the average American infant was born already reading Sanskrit  and reciting “O Captain, My Captain” from memory.