On Jul 2, 2009, at 3:24 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I don't agree with Michael that I was pulling a bait-and-switch
below, but
I could have made the following line clearer: "I believe that any
two given
notions are ALWAYS different to some degree, and often VERY
different." I
truly did have in mind both two notions of "the same thing" (like
Chicago),
and two notions of different things: Gibraltar and diabetes.
What I didn't have explicitly clear in my own mind was what would
prompt me
to call some notions VERY different. It's still not "perfectly"
clear, in
part because it's a moving target. The criterion for my using 'very'
is
comparable to that for my using 'serviceable'.
Well, you seemed to have an inkling of the troublesome problem. It
strikes me as extremely naive to assert that two individual's "very
different" notions of Chicago is in some degree equivalent to the
differences between the notions of Gibraltar and diabetes. That is
analogous to saying that magenta and Chinese red are very different
shades of red, and cadmium yellow and dioxazine purple are similarly
very different shades of colors.
Ah, "very different shades of red" designates a range within a color
region in the spectrum, but "very different shades of colors"
designates an initially wider range, which is already calibrated by
the different names of the colors.
That's like your two examples: notions of Chicago, which indeed can be
called "very different" because they name a single subject (Chicago)
but construct dissimilar notions of it; Chicago is like the range of
red hues. And notions of Gibraltar and diabetes, which have almost
nothing in common, like yellow and purple.
And you still haven't begun to discuss what "very" adds to your
notion. A person who lived in St. Louis might think that someone who
lived in Knoxville was very close to the Atlantic, but the Knoxvillean
might think a person in Raleigh would be very close, and a Raleigh
resident would think a person in Wilmington is "very" close.
Tell us more about your "very."
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/
