On Sep 17, 2012, at 11:03 AM, Michael Brady wrote: > when I encountered a difficult accent or speech > inflection, at some point I could figuratively drag the spoken sounds onto the > paradigm phonemes I had internalized (the "right way" to pronounce sounds) and > the meaning would "snap" into my awareness and be quite evident.
Understood, but my claim is that it's not "THE meaning" that's snapping into your awareness; it's a memory. You were abruptly "reminded" of an earlier encounter with the phoneme (with a slightly different pronunciation) when your brain forged your "me-meaning" from the notions associated with it at the time. > > I was well aware of this kind of "representational latitude" in painting and > drawing. I had learned it from my early years and knew it intuitively. Because all notion is "multiplex" -- a mix of many "parts" which will never be exactly duplicated again -- a new notion can "remind" us of earlier notion even though it is not identical to it. There's a man at my gym whose face is remarkably "like" J. Edgar Hoover's, and I never see him without thinking of Hoover. Is this sort of thing what you have in mind with "representational latitude"? It seemed to me the great illustrator Al Hirschfeld had a remarkable gift for discerning the most telling aspect of his subjects. Talented political cartoonists -- and "impressionists" one sees on television -- have also impressed me in this way.
