Monday, June 16, 2014

Soties: catalogue raisonné


To reference all the posts on this site that deal in humor, would be impossible -- or rather, dead easy:

=>  passim  <=

(Devotees of Kolmogorov-Chaitin Complexity Theory will appreciate that one.)

But one subset  we shall single out for especial mention:  soties.  (That which we call -- which we are pleased to call -- which we are pleased as Punch to call:  soties.)
The word is very old, and French.  The particular spin we put on it springs from André Gide's Les Caves du Vatican (1914), which he so labels, on the frontispiece where rather the reader might expect to see roman.

Round and /round and /round   we go...

As used here (and the application is so particular, that it is virtually a re-coinage, like our use of aturdido, which we use to refer to a sort of sotie-in-nuce), the term denotes -- or rather (denoting being difficult, vide Russell), dances around the connotational penumbra of -- a certain (oder vielmehr, uncertain)  genre of erudite trifling, of learnèd nugae, of brain-born fancies of la gaya scienza -- le gai savoir.  You can consult the complete roster of such offerings  here.
(Paradoxical Trigger Warning:  The unsophisticated reader might be startled to see -- or to seem to see -- this very post  leading the list, and might imagine that he hasn’t moved anywhere;  but he has.   For, as Jeeves once well observed, “You cannot step into the same river twice  without spoiling your trousers”:  the post as you are reading it now, is in its specific haecceity;  yet then, sub specie sotietas.   For indeed, the Book of All Indexes  does list itself in itself;  Russell and Borges took care of that matter  long ago.

Selected soties:

(A)  Suitable for children


(B)  Suitable for simpletons


(C) These require a philosophy Ph.D.

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