Memoriam / Memento

 

On this day of remembrance, we honor  both those who perished in the attacks, and those, volunteers or first-responders, who waded in to the still-steaming rubble, not only on that day, but for days or weeks thereafter,  braving the health-hazards which, alas, as the years rolled by, claimed many of them before their time.

On that day, I resolved to leave my corporate job -- not to simply move on to a different job, but to join a mission -- the CT mission -- down by the beltway.  That mission filled my waking hours for the next twenty years, until my recent retirement.

 

*

 

The mission has evolved, but it isn’t over.   It has morphed:   we now have more to fear from cyberattacks than from airplanes.   Still, certain strands from the old days may yet be discerned.  For instance:

The Huthis have re-emerged from media dormancy, and are once again making mischief in Yemen, and in KSA and the Red Sea as well.  Along with that -- a tiny detail, but the only one now within my wheelhouse -- there’s the matter of how to pronounce that Arabic tribal name.  Mispronunciations have reëmerged on the airwaves.   De minimis, maybe;  but, as a licensed Arabist and orthoëpist, I can still contribute my linguist’s mite to the pile.

 

Herewith a re-posting of a piece from 2019.

 

*    *    *

 

Having improbably broken out of their northwest-Yemen fastnesses, first to overrun Yemen itself, later to seek targets elsewhere,  a previously obscure Zaydi tribal formation  has now captured world headlines and are all over the airwaves.   It’s still early days, and two pronunciations are vying for mastery, one correct and one a mispronunciation.  The correct pronunciation is: 

 

HOO-thee 

 

with the voiceless version of the interdental fricative which English transcribes as th,  thus rhyming with toothy.  (Were it the voiced version of our ambiguous digraph th, it would rhyme with smoothie.)  Some broadcasters are mispronouncing it HOO-tee;  this post is an effort to strangle that in the cradle.   (We earlier offered the same service w.r.t.  ISIS vs ISIL;  in that case, the changeling won out.)

 

This interdental fricative phoneme is not especially common among the better-known world languages, but Arabic in fact has it, as a full-fledged phoneme (rather than as subphonemic contextual variants)  in both voiced and voiceless versions, respectively spelled  ذ   and   ث  .  The latter appears in the Yemeni name حوثي

 

Both the mispronunciation with “-tee”, and the variant spelling “Houthi”, stem from the French.  The French language lacks both of these “th” phonemes, and the h sound as well,   hence they are reduced to bleating   “oo-tee”.  But you wouldn’t want to sound like that, now would you.

 

Footnote:  Re "the 'h' sound": 

Ambiguous.  (“It depends upon what the meaning of “the ‘h’ sound” is.”)

Arabic actually boasts two phonemically distinct versions, a breathy one, passably similar to the English initial in "house", and a ‘strong’ or pharyngealized one, in Arabic spelled with ح .   There is no need to attempt the articulatory acrobatics necessary to bring forth that sound, most people learn it from the cradle or not at all.  Plain “HOO-thee” will do.

 

 

*    *    *

 

Update 14 Sept 2026: 

So now those frisky Huthis  are messing with the Bâb al-Mandab, gateway to the Red Sea.   Again, the pron:

The vowel in Bâb, core-meaning ‘door’, is phonemically long (a fact indicated by the circumflex in the transcription; a macron would do equally well), and phonetically somewhat fronted -- how múch fronted depends upon the dialect, but no matter: pronounce it like the “a” in man.

The vowels in Mandab (dictionary-meaning ‘lamentation’, but the application here is somewhat cloudy) are both short, in quantity; and in quality, they may vary, subphonemically,  between a relatively-fronted sound, and a more back one as in father.  

The noun is sometimes transcribed with an “e”: Bab el-Mandeb, in reflection of this vocalic fronting. 

Key point:  since the final vowel is short, the word-stress is on the initial syllable:  MAN
-dab.

So  now you know.

 

Huthi: How to Pronounce it

Having improbably broken out of their northwest-Yemen fastnesses, first to overrun Yemen itself, a previously obscure Zaydi tribal formation  has now captured world headlines and are all over the airwaves.   It’s still early days, and two pronunciations are vying for mastery, one correct and one a mispronunciation.  The correct pronunciation is: 

HOO-thee, 

with the voiceless version of the interdental fricative which English transcribes as th,  thus rhyming with toothy.  (Were it the voiced version of our ambiguous digraph th, it would rhyme with smoothie.)  Some broadcasters are mispronouncing it HOO-tee;  this post is an effort to strangle that in the cradle.   (We earlier offered the same service w.r.t.  ISIS vs ISIL;  in that case, the changeling won out.)

This interdental fricative phoneme is not especially common among the better-known world languages, but Arabic in fact has it in both voiced and voiceless versions, respectively spelled  ذ   and   ث  .  The latter appears in the Yemeni name حوثي.

The French language lacks both of these, and the h sound as well,   hence they are reduced to bleating   “oo-tee”.  But you wouldn’t want to sound like that, now would you.

Footnote:  Re "the 'h' sound": 

Arabic actually boasts two phonemically distinct versions, a breathy one, passably similar to the English initial in "house", and a ‘strong’ or pharyngealized one, in Arabic spelled with ح . 

Twinned Witnesses

For Christmas, our son gave me a brace of books -- carefully boxed together, a kind of electron-positron pair.   He conceived them as forming, not a mere set-theoretic union, but a tensor product of two Hermitian conjugates, intricately linked.  These are:

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016)

and

Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power:  An American Tragedy (2017).

BLUF:  both excellent, and “better together”.

To comment on their sociopolitical content  would be beyond our brief.  But a literary note on the structure of the latter.

An anthology of articles spanning years  is problematic.  At the worst, it can be a gaggle of op-ed pieces  that turn out to be less than the sum of their parts.   Eight Years is notably successful in this respect.  It reprints the original (memorable) pieces of essay-reportage, from The Atlantic (these have aged very well), and embeds them successively in the skeleton of a memoir of those very years.  The personal/reportorial dialectic proves energizing.

Historical footnote:  As most who have even heard of him  know, Mr Coates champions an old idea -- Reparations -- whose current status in the zeitgeist resembles that of a letter-bomb.   Some perspective, from a wide-ranging book of psychosocial history, which begins in Colonial times  and concludes with a chapter called “Native Sons”:

Faced with expanding black claims, resistance and repression may become more bitter, even, than in the past. … A more equalitarian ideology  might itself increase savagery if repression occurs, given the tricks guilt plays in the human mind.

-- Wilson McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), p. 613

Orthoepic footnote:  Mr Coates’ puzzling prénom put me in mind of Nefertiti; but adepts assure me that it rhymes with Tallahassee.   Thus, it is not exactly “pronounced the way it’s spelled”, but then neither is François.

Name of the Day: “Henery”

Back in 1965, when I still listened to the blandly homogenized pop medium known as Top 40 radio, a song soared onto the charts  that didn’t fit the rock & roll mold at all, and seemed to come from another world:  “I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am”.  It was harmless, charming, catchy.   Once ever you heard it, you could never forget it:

    I'm 'Enery the Eighth, I am,

    'Enery the Eighth I am, I am!

    I got married to the widow next door,

    She's been married seven times before

    And every one was an 'Enery

    She wouldn't have a Willie nor a Sam

    I'm her eighth old man named 'Enery

    'Enery the Eighth, I am!

Wikipedia (that fount of all that is good and true) provides the surprising background.  It is a British music-hall song dating back to as early as 1910 -- few indeed were the ditties of such venerable vintage that made it onto the pop playlists.  And yet -- scarcely to be credited:

In 1965, it became the fastest-selling song in history to that point when it was revived by Herman's Hermits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Henery_the_Eighth,_I_Am

~

What revived that memory  was a passage in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), referring to a simple workman of rural southwest England:

He always signed his name "Henery"—strenuously insisting upon that spelling, and if any passing schoolmaster ventured to remark that the second "e" was superfluous and old-fashioned, he received the reply that "H-e-n-e-r-y" was the name he was christened and the name he would stick to—in the tone of one to whom orthographical differences were matters which had a great deal to do with personal character. 

As kids, exposed to the ditty, we made no philological hypotheses concerning the trisyllabic name -- just something silly, metri causâ, we supposed.  But Hardy’s witness demonstrates that the pronunciation is time-honored among the English popular classes.

Yea indeed, still further up the scale:  for the regal name of Henry is trisyllabic in Shakespeare.

The medial schwa is not etymological, but the product of popular epenthesis (or anaptyxis, if you insist), like the pronunciation “ellum” for elm, or the by-form alarum from alarm.

Psycho-literary afternote:
This serial connubium, relentlessly running through no fewer than eight grooms, might be seen as a feminine revenge -- a payback with interest --  against the original polynubial King Henry, who actually limited himself to half a dozen.

"N-n-ex-x-x-t !!"

Word of the Day: “Pigovian” (expanded)

[update of a note originally published  4 Dec 2012]

The lead item in this week’s New Yorker introduces (with considerable fanfare) a new word:  Pigovian, as the adjective derived from the name of an otherwise little-celebrated economist, one Pigou, who, many years ago, floated the idea (which had surely been floating of its own accord, for millennia) that if you make a mess, you should maybe chip in to the costs of cleaning it up.   The author of this “Talk” piece, Elizabeth Kolbert, is a frequent writer on climate-change matters, and her proposal is that the general public now embrace the designation of a carbon tax as “Pigovian”, in that it pays back some of the costs of global warming.

Now, it might well be imagined that the suggestion is superfluous, and that the notion already has a name:  nuisance tax.  Yet that phrase has already long been defined in an entirely unrelated sense:  not of a tax on nuisances, (the way a luxury tax is a tax on luxuries), but (apparently -- it is really not a happy coinage) a tax that is considered to be itself a nuisance (in that it is not large enough to qualify as a burden, say).  As Merriam-Webster © defines it:

an excise tax collected in small amounts on a wide range of commodities directly from the consumer

Yet, even did the old phrase nuisance tax mean what, syntagmatically, it ought to mean, there is an argument for using a more distinctive word for a category that is growing in importance, as ever-wider circles of citizens become alert to what economists have long called the tragedy of the commons.   For, once you have a word like Pigovian, entirely unburdened by other associations, you can readily extract it from the phrase Pigovian tax, and use elliptic derivata like “Pigovian considerations” or “counter-Pigovian” (where “counter-nuisance” here wouldn’t work at all, since it means the opposite of what “counter-Pigovian” would mean, i.e. ‘pro-nuisance’).  Such relationships between morphology and semantics are discussed in my book The Semantics of Form in Arabic, and form the core of the chapter “The Stokes Conjecture”.

[Update 23 April 2017]  This just in:  a Pigovian accord:
http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/norway-first-to-ratify-polluter-pays-treaty

So!  Now for the morpho-phonological characteristics of this rather odd-looking word, Pigovian.   The base-form is pronounced pig-OO, yet the adjective comes out pig-OH-vee-an.  Why?

Unlike sturdy old Anglo-Saxon suffixes like -ness, -dom, -hood-, -kin-, or -ly, which allow themselves to be simply tacked-on at the end of a word, leaving all else as is, the Latin-derived -ian is a tyrant, demanding that the stress be moved to the immediately preceding syllable (if it wasn’t already there), and that its vowel (if not tense already) be tensed.  Thus:  Dickens (DIK-enz) vs. Dickensian (dik-ENZ-ee-an), and (with vowel-tensing) Jacob (JAY-kub) vs. Jacobian (ja-KOH-bee an).  (Thus the derivative is pronounced in the mathematical community. An unrelated adjective with a different suffix, Jacobean, relating to history and literature, is pronounced jak-ub-EE-an.)  And as a further impudent exigency, this tyrannical suffix spurns unmediated Anschluss onto a vowel, demanding rather a bridge-consonant -v-:  thus (Bernard) Shaw vs. Shavian (SHAY-vee-an, with both vowel-tensing and inserted bridge).   As well as (in a more roundabout fashion -- this one doesn’t really count) Warsaw vs. Varsovian (rhymes with Nabokovian).  It is thus that our poor unassuming Mr. Pigou (whom I picture rather as Mr. Magoo)) becomes, adjectivally, a roaring shouting syllable-rattling PIGOVIAN.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Note:  Strictly, the derivatum should have been Pigouvian, on the model of Peru :  Peruvian.  The word succumbed to the gravitational attracion of the plethora of words in -ovian (a productive category, given all the Slavic names in -ov/-off).  Further, why burden an already ungainly word with the stressed syllable GOO, as opposed to GO ?  This way, it gets to rhyme with a cool studly word like Jovian.

Cf. this derivatum, re Richard Montegue:   "Montegovian compositionality" (Alice ter Meulen, in

Frederick Newmeyer, ed. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey (1988: CUP), vol. I, p. 441)

Footnote:  Something in our Teutonic blood  disdains such tricks.  Thus, instead of a morphological equivalent of Pigovian tax, German just says Pigou-steuer.  And rather than submit to the indignity of a  *Hemingwavian (hem-ing-WAY-vee-an), we go with a different suffix altogether, once that leaves vowels as they are and requires no bridge-consonant:  Hemingwayesque.    (Still not very dignified, though, as the suffix here hogs the main stress to itself, and tends to make you think of words like grotesque and burlesque.)

Morphophonology:
Compare and contrast  Babeuf => Babouvisme.

French in particular is pre-attuned to such vocalic ablaut  by the existence, side by side, of  locally-developed place-names, along with gentilés derived more transparently from the original Latin toponym.  As, Loire (from Latin Liger) => Ligérien.  Such transformations may be found even when the etymon is not Latin, as

   Aisne => Axonais
   Rhône => Rhodanien

   Reims (earlier Rheims) => Rémois

and even such acrobatics as

    Saint-Germain-des-Prés => germanopratin

    Seine-Saint-Denis => Séquanodionysien

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian.

There are parallels in Castilian:
   Salamanca => Salmantino

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian, Manchester => Mancusian.

Bashar al-Assad: Orthography and Orthoëpy

As regards the current controversy over the actions of the Syrian President:  In the absence of capacity  materially to affect the direction of political debate, we can at least advise the instruction-hungry public  how to spell and say his name.   In this, we echo the immortal observation of Professor Henry Higgins, who in his learnèd treatise  Bella Damma Mea  observed:   “The French don’t care what they do actually, so long as they pronounce it properly.”

In a nutshell:  In Arabic, the sibilant in Assad is actually pronounced as single, and thus in principle should be so written.  The ‘shibilant’ in Bashar is, by contrast, a phonetically long (morphophonemically doubled) consonant, and ideally would be so transcribed.  In short, the usual spelling in English transcription has it exactly bassackwards.

If you really wanted to be exact about it, you would transcribe the name (if diacritics are available) as  Baššâr al-Asad.  Or, in our usual alphabet, Bashshar...

 And indeed, it appears that the State Department does indeed use the Asad style (while suppressing the al-).  From the "Dissent Channel" memo  published today in the New York Times:

(SBU) Secondly, a more assertive U.S. role to protect and preserve opposition-held communities, by defending them from Asad’s air force and artillery, presents the best chance for defeating Da’esh in Syria. The prospects for rolling back Da’esh’s hold on territory are bleak without the Sunni Arabs, who the regime continues to bomb and starve. A de facto alliance with the regime against Da’esh would not guarantee success: Asad’s military is undermanned and exhausted.

  [Acronym note:  SBU means:  You won't be prosecuted for sharing this (a good thing, too, since I just did), but do not disseminate beyond the circle of your very closest BFFs on Facebook.]

The given-name بشار  is not itself a dictionary word, but is an emphatic/frequentive form based on a root meaning “rejoice, good news”.  The surname means ‘lion’, and, in the Arabic context, connotes nobility and bravery.

As for the pronunciation:  bash-SHAR al-AH-sad (capitals representing stressed syllables).   Now, what do you immediately notice?

Unlike French or Turkish or Persian or many other languages -- and pace some American radio announcers -- Arabic wordstress is not fixed upon a given-positioned syllable (counting either from the front or from the rear).  Superficially, Arabic is like English or Russian, allowing free contrastive stress.  But in fact (speaking only of Classical Arabic here), it is instead like Latin:  the wordstress is predictable given knowledge of the sequence of long versus short syllables. Baššâr has a long vowel in the final syllable, and hence is oxytone; Asad, a short, and hence is a troche.

Words from the Smithy: “Islamist(ic(al(ly)))”

In an earlier post (“Dominionism”),  we discussed the terminological distinction between Islamic and Islamist (the latter being a professorial confection, originally French, which later events propelled onto the Public Square), along with a proposed newer word, Christianist.   But the battle-lines have hardened since then, with Islamist becoming ever more consistently pejorative, by now so overflowing with negativity that some of it splashes over onto its blamesless paronym, Islamic.    So, we need some semantic clarification, and lexicographic legislation.  The point here is not to argue one politico-theological position or another, but simply to provide writers with a clean, precise set of tools.

So let it be written, so let it be said:

Islam (Islamic) : one of the Abrahamic faiths. (Cf. Judaism, Christianity.)

Islamism  (Islamist) :  theologically, a distilled and stiffened variety of the above (cf. Orthodox flavors of Judaism and Christianity), but with a dominionist addition (cf. Muslim Brotherhood;  aspects of ancient and of modern Israel;  Caesaropapism).  A less lapidary formulation is "Political Islam".

A Muslim (anyhow on Fridays),

but i’ faith, no Islamist.

To these we add coinages of our own, for yet finer semantic distinctions:

Islamistic :  exaggeratedly Islamist.  (Cf. Fundamentalism.  ISIL probably fits in here.)

Islamistical : exaggeratedly Islamistic. (Cf. Branch Dravidians, Boko Haram.)

Islamistically: in an Islamistic(al) manner 

Islamisticality:  the property of proceding Islamistically.

Islamisticaloidal : a to-tall-ly over-the-top wacko distortion of Islam (Cf. the medieval Persian cult of the Assassins, and (for Christianity) the contemporary Lord’s Resistance Army, of central Africa.)

Abu-Hamza:  un tant soit peu  islamisticaloïde

Islamisticaloidaliferous :   ? -- No, sorry, that one’s just plain silly.
[Though compare, to be sure, Fouad Laroui's anti-Da`ish coinage  califarfelutique, of similar meaning.]

post-meta-Islamisticaloidaliferosity:  [Sorry, this Premium Content is reserved for Gold Card ™ subscribers to the World of Dr Justice © ]

  

~

That is part parody;  but it is a fact of the English language that extra suffixes are sometimes tacked on with pejorative intent.  Thus, for -ist/-ism:

C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1967), p. 112: "If we call the speculations of Whitehead or Jeans or Eddington `scientism' (as distinct from 'science')"

This on its own  stamped her  not only as an irremediable third-rate genteelist bullshitter, but…

-- Kingsley Amis, The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990), p. 31

-istic:

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 240: "He inaugurated the scientific, or perhaps scientistic, phase of baseball statistics."

Cf. further military vs. militaristic.

[Update 5 March 2015] An article in this morning’s Washington Post reports that the new Saudi King, Salman, has awarded a prize to an Indian Muslim, whom the Post labels an “Islamic supremacist”.

More on this charmer:

His orthodox, Wahhabist views — affiliated closely with the Saudi state — are polarizing in India, which is home to a diverse set of Muslim traditions and sects. His conservatism has led him to make statements endorsing the use of female sex slaves and allegedly expressing sympathy for terrorists.

In a 2008 video, he claimed President George W. Bush was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. "Even a fool will know that this was an inside job," Naik said. Years before, he appeared to offer tacit backing to terrorist masterminds such as Osama bin Laden.

"If [Bin Laden] is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, I am with him," he said in one video. "Every Muslim should be a terrorist."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/04/the-saudi-king-gave-a-prize-to-an-islamic-scholar-who-says-911-was-an-inside-job/?hpid=z5

~

Next comes the question as to the proper pronunciation of this relatively new term Islamist.   The version I came away with after having spent a few years in and around the Near Eastern Studies department at Berkeley, is forestressed:  IS-lam-ist; and that is the version heard just a moment ago on a BBC broadcast   But the U.S. media is now regularly saying is-LAM-ist.    So the question is:  where did this form IS-lam-ist come from -- is -ist, like -ic, one of those suffixes that rearrange stress?

The classic Chomsky-Halle Sound Pattern of English  appears not to give decisive examples, nor a rule, for this affix.  But Hans Marchand’s The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation has several fine pages on -ist, and on page 310 states definitely:  “The stress of the -ist word is on the same syllable as in the unsufixed basis.”  And indeed, upon reflection:  we say car-TOON-ist, re-FORM-ist.    So no, -ist need not repel the stress.   And yet is-LAM-ist sounds odd to me;  I have no idea why.

[Footnote:  Marchand's work is inexhaustibly rich; but unfortunately he does not discuss the semantic nuances among -ist/-istic/-istical.]

It might seem mildly paradoxical that the longer, rather abstruse-looking coinages I have offered, are actually more determinate in pronunciation, since they contain suffixes which overrule the stress-pattern of whatever they attach to.  Thus, unambiguously:   is-lam-IST-ic, is-lam-IST-ic-al-ly, versus is-lam-ist-i-CAL-it-y.

[Update 15 March 2015]  Further expert testimony against those who would absolve ISIL and Islam from any taint of each other, via the No True Scotsman maneuver.  Reviewing a new monograph by Cole Brunzel:

The Islamic State’s version of jihadi-Salafism is predicated on an extremist reading of Islamic scripture that is also textually rigorous, deeply rooted in a premodern theological tradition, and elaborated on by a recognized cadre of religious authorities.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/03/ideology-of-islamic-state

[Update 3 April 2015]  King Salman of KSA is hanging tough on the islamistical front, and this at a time when he needs an international coalition to support his invasion of Yemen:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/04/02/saudi-arabia-warns-canada-to-not-support-blogger-sentenced-to-1000-lashes/

Here he accuses Canada of lèse-shariah. 

[Update 6 juin 2015] French belletrists now have a word for islamisticality:  le Nazislamisme

[7 juin 2015]  And:  Islamikaze (Islamic kamikaze).

[26 Juni 2015]  Leser-kommentar, apud Die Presse (Wien):

Diejenigen, die den Asyl-wahnsinn mitmachen, sind als Eurabier zu bezeichnen.

[4 March 2016]
An apparently slighting term that is cropping up in current Arabic prose is thawrji, from thawrah ‘revolution’ plus the humble, Turkish-derived agent-suffix -ji : thus, ‘revolutionary poseur’.

عقبة بن نافع

In our earlier post, we discussed the rhetoric and linguistics of the ISIL-associated name Dabiq.  And now, in this morning’s headlines, there is another:

In the latest terror incident in Tunisia, a group which, a while back, pledged allegiance to ISIL, killed four policemen.  The group is being reported as Phalange Okba Ibn Nafaâ, Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade and various other renditions.   A proper transcription would be Katîbat `Uqba ibn Nâfi`, or `Uqbah ibn Nâfi` Brigade.   (Here the circumflexes, for which you may also substitute a macron, indicate a long vowel, which affects the stress:  thus, it is the first syllable of Nâfi` that is stressed.)  In Arabic:

عقبة بن نافع

So who is this gentleman, for whom the brigade is named?  

Not, as one might suppose, some recent martyr who is being commemorated (such is the style of Palestinian groups, for instance).   Rather, the group has reached all the way back to the 600s A.D. -- the first few years of the Islamic era. Uqba ibn Nafi was a Crusading Muslim general who led the conquest of the Maghreb, after his famous uncle had conquered Egypt.

Here they are  smiling for their group portrait:

Having a wonderful Time -- Wish U were here

This harking back to the earliest days of Islam, is typical of Salafis, and is in line with the choice of Dabiq for the magazine.

Ontological Epigrams

Okhamians like Quine (for so I shall refer to him, out of deference to my former professor, so as to avoid the loathsome connotations of Nominalist) are concerned not to clutter up the ontology with extra entities like facts or meanings which parallel and move in unison with statements  without really adding anything useful.  Strawson (a reliable nutshell-stuffer) puts it in a nutshell  thus:

Facts are what statements (when true) state;  they are not what statements are about.

-- P.F.Strawson, “Truth” (1950; often anthologized)

~     ~     ~

Quantum superposition is ontological, not epistemological.  It is not that we don’t know what state the cat is in.

(Unfortunately I have forgotten who said this.  Mark Twain?)

~     ~     ~

The ontological touchstone for British analytic philosophy, whether of the Idealist or the Empiricist inclination, has ever been the Tree in the Quad.    For several thousand years, this noble oak has been under uninterrupted observation by a rota of pre-Chalcolithic druids, lest it pop out of being, unobserved.  What a shame that would be!  It was such a nice tree!

~     ~     ~

The first question of ontology is:  What is there?

The answer to this, as Quine put it: Everything.
(Yet adds the stern proviso:  But no more than that.)

The second is, of each thing:  What is it?

To answer this, we may revise good Bishop Butler thus.

=>  Everything is, what it is  --  along with several other things as well.

Thus: a diamond is:

* A costly gem, proverbial for hardness

* A face-centered cubic crystaline allotrope of carbon

* A girl’s best friend

* Forever.

Given this, the question, What is Being? (überhaupt or tout court), must be categorized as meta-ontological.

~     ~     ~

Meinong’s bizarre deviation(**) … was … jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein.  Oddly enough, I find this idea a good one, provided that we bolster it with Bentham’s theory of fictions.  Contextual definition, or what Bentham called paraphrasis, can enable us to talk very considerably and conveniently about putative objects  without footing an ontological bill.  It is a strictly legitimate way of making theories in which there is less than meets the eye.

--- Quine, “Existence and Quantification”

The concluding epigram of that paragraph  is particularly relished by Minimalists.

(** Note:  The reference is to that philosopher’s ontological exuberence,  and not to any possible undue familiarities with capybaras during off-hours.)

~     ~     ~

Thus far the apophthegmatic epitome.  If these have whetted your appetite, click here.

[Orthoepic update]  Since folks keep clicking on this post, I'll add this:
The fifty-dollar first word of this essay  refers to the Nominalist, William of Okham.  That last word is pronounced OCK-um.  But the adjective, Okhamian (which I possibly just made up, but on a proper model) would be pronounced ock-HAY-mee-an.
Try to work this into your next singles-bar conversation.  It's guaranteed.

~     ~     ~

« Ontology can be saved  with a sufficient ideology. »

-- Saul Kripke, “Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?”,

in: Evans & McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning (1976), p. 343

Not sure what that means, exactly;  but it has a lilt to it, like “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist”;  of which, perhaps, it is a paraphrase.