Mixed Metaphors

[An update to this essay]

[Update 23 April 2015]  In this whole Mediterranean melodrama, there is one thing that every faction, of whatever shade of opinion, unanimously agrees upon.   And that is, that the  “smugglers” -- the “Human Traffickers” -- are the bad guys.  They serve the convenient role of “Neo-Nazis” for Hollywood studios that want to make an international thriller without offending any group:  Just make the bad guys Neo-Nazis.  (Or, in a pinch -- just German will do.  The Germans themselves will never object:  whipped curs.)  The Italian Prime Minister came up with a metaphor that has been enthusiastically embraced by everyone:  the “Traffickers” are the contemporary equivalent of … Slave Traders!   (All in unison:  Booooo, slave traders!  Kumbaya.)

That comparison is, however, nonsense.   The négriers, after all, kidnapped their victims;  whereas the would-be migrants themselves come forward and solicit the traffickers’ services.    As for the traffickers, you can’t really even call them smugglers, since their SOP is the opposite of clandestine:  Send out a rafiot;  then call the Italian sea-taxi service for free-of-charge rescue and pizza  (200 mushroom, 400 anchovies, 12 sausage -- no, cancel that last order, those were the Christians, they just got thrown overboard).  A closer historical parallel to the traffickers would would be … the Underground Railroad.   (Albeit one that charges for its services.)   Or, from another standpoint:  A sort of mirror-image of Club Med.

Francois Hollande, for his part (less imaginative, that man) calls the traffickers “terrorists”.   -- Umm… No.  How are they terrorists?  They just want to make a buck.  -- True, some proportion of their cruise passengers are likely terrorists -- ISIL has promised as much -- but that no more makes the cruise operators terrorists, than the airlines were, when they carried the 9/11 hijackers, or the shoe bomber, or the underwear bomber, etc.

Mathematical Metaphor of the Month

From Hugo Schuchardt’s essay, “Sachen und Wörter” (1912):

Ein Fortschritt im allgemeinen Sinn  wird nur dadurch erzielt, daß  Sachforschung und Wortforschung  nicht bloß … nebeneinander stehen,  sondern daß sie sich durchdringen,  sich miteinander verflechten  und zu Ergebnissen zweifacher Art führen.   Kurz, das  und  in “Sachen und Wörter”  verwandele sich  aus einem Additionszeichen  in ein Multiplikationszeichen:  es entwickle sich  eine Sach-wort-geschichte.

A sort of “tensor product” of vocabulary and reality, alors.

[Update]  Someone whose behest I would not dream of discounting, just emailed me saying “Translation please!”, saying he disdains to resort to Google.

Surprised that anyone would dare to diss the Godlike Google, I checked on Google Translate.  This is what it came up with:

A progress in the general sense is only achieved in that kind of research and research not just word ... next to each other, but that they penetrate each other, intertwine with each other and lead to results of two kinds. Short, and in "things and words" Can you turn off an addition sign in a multiplication sign: it was developing a kind-word-history.

Umm … hmmm …. Not quite ready for prime-time, actually.  In fact -- not even ready for Cable.

(As a professional translator, I feel rather schadenfroh over such MT mishaps!)

OK, so I’ll try my hand at it:

True progress [for the philologer] can be achieved only when the depiction of Things  and the depiction of Words   do not simply coexist side-by-side, but rather -- interpenetrate,  nay -- interweave,  the warp of one  through the other’s woof, and thus yield a self-dual result.   That is to say:  the “and” and “Words and Things” must sublate the addition-sign into a (so to speak) multiplication-sign [of interanimated implication, inseparably intertwined]: thus then is born a [Janus-observing] ‘Word-cum-Thing-complexus’.

(Hey, I never promised I’d translate it into Easy English!)

Note:  That “warp and woof” business was a bit of Dragoman’s License ™, but Schuchardt himself avails himself of the same metaphor, a bit later in the same essay:

Treten Sachen und Wörter … zueinander in Beziehung, so müssen wir sie uns unter dem Bilde  nicht paralleler, sonder sich kreuzender Linien vorstellen,  etwa die Sache als Ketten-  und die Wörter als Einschußfäden.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 129

Schuchardt is referring to the Wörter-und-Sachen movement, which stepped out of the close air of the philological closet, to consider Realia (“Sachen”), and the evolution of language in concert with that.   Schuchardt seems to be striving towards a more dialectical conception of that initially empiricist program:  the ‘tensor product’ of the two von Hause aus quite separate enterprises (as, dendrology and onomastics -- cf. the classic Indo-European Trees) being necessarily mediated by the ideational:  in the words of the scholastics:  Voces significant res  mediantibus conceptibus.

http://www.liveinternet.ru/journalshowcomments.php?jpostid=150171859&journalid=762167&go=next&categ=0

It was exactly such a progress that I undertook in my (alas unpublished) monograph, Linguistic Life on the Left (dating back to Berkeley days), which was written, not in the spirit of a lepidopterist, but from within the Zeitgeist.

On Symbols

We spoke earlier of the relative adequacy, as a “symbol”, of the traditional OT picture of Jehovah,  to the uncountably infinite trans-reality of the Godhead Him-/It-/Blorg-/self.  This symbol is, literally, infinitely inadequate.  And yet adequate to our understanding, depending upon how high we have climbed on the ladder;  and crucially more adequate than certain alternatives, proposed by various paganisms and modern heresies.  Our purpose here is broadly  to defend the very idea of using symbols, and indeed the intellectual integrity of an admittedly threadbare image, simply by pointing out that such reduction to the palpable  is no mental vice unique to religion, but may be found even within -- nay, not science merely, to show that would be child's-play:  but even within that most abstract and impalpable exercise in mental extension, mathematics.

Consider, then, one of the simplest of mathematical objects:   the torus.  You have all seen this described as the “surface of a donut”.  Set aside the humbly sensuous coffee-dunking aspect of this:  the very essence of the image, be it of inner-tube or anchor-ring (the latter metaphor  was favored by our ancesters), is already a concession to our infirmity:  specifically, to our own creaturely incarnation in three spatial dimensions (this particular Sitz im Leben being of no mathematical significance whatsoever).  It is a symbol -- and quite an adequate one -- of the embedded torus:  but not (and this is crucial) of the torus as mathematicians now understand it, as conceived within itself:  but rather as embedded (with some bending) into the cramped space in which we dwell.   Beholding the donut, you think:  How curvaceous, surely more curvy than the surface of a tennis ball.  And yet, in its essence, it is not curved at all: Its intrinsic geometry is completely flat; and this “inner flatness” manifests itself  even in the embedded object, whose Euler characteristic turns out to be zero (as against 2 for the sphere).  (For a magisterial exposition of all this, see Jeffrey Weeks,  The Shape of Space.)   A more adequate symbol would be simply a rectangle with opposite edges identified -- or better yet, the toroidal covering-space which carpets R x  R with infinite replications of this patch-sample.  (Already how distantly we have left behind the donut !)   This symbol is still not the torus itself, as it thrones in Platonic heaven;  but it is a symbol which, unlike that of the donut, is wonderfully productive of new ideas.  As: Identify one pair of opposite edges as before, in parallel; but the other pair, anti-parallel, “with a twist”.  The result is a Klein bottle, not embeddable in three-space at all.  (Though four will suffice.)   Or, as:  Instead of parallel-identification of opposite edges of a square, perform an orientation-matching identification of opposite faces of a cube (thus resulting in a universe that is finite though Euclidean -- something they told me was impossible, when I was but a little boy in short-pants).   Or indeed (and now the usual geometrical torus of the nursery, seems as pale a reflection of the basic idea, as does that java-sodden donut of the former):  Consider any product (finite or infinite, countable or not) of R-mod-1 with itself -- a torus let loose from the leading-strings.
Similar such exercises result in surfaces we could never previously have imagined, as the very best scientists did not, but which, looked at correctly, become almost intuitive.  One of them might be the shape of the very space we live in.

It is, I suspect (speaking under correction), in part for such intellectual   reasons, that the Church Fathers, cognizant of the very partial truth of the God-the-Father Yahweh image, attempted to fill the picture out, with the doctrine of a Trinity (a blessed doctrine, it may be:  but arrived at, not handed to us on a platter in the Bible).  The symbol is not fruitful if you press it into fetishistic ends, snorfling up triads wherever they may be found; but it is an improvement on what went before.