A few grim minutes spent delving into the mystery of quotation marks
in Word and Office convinced me that it is word,somewhere, somehow. It
is extremely unlikely that Databack is incompatible with Word and very
likely that whatever injuries Word or Office inflict are accepted
without any attempt to give first aid,largely because you never really
know what crazy thing members of the general public are trying now and
they might like it like that. Count yourself lucky-apparently Word puts
in entire blocks of text all by itself without any notice to the actual
person writing whatever.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]>
To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]>; cheerskep
<[email protected]>
Sent: Sat, Dec 29, 2012 4:33 pm
Subject: Re: sorry
This one came through exactly as keyboard. (Reminder: It was originally
keyboarded in Final Draft, and then copied and pasted into an AOL email
sent
to aesthetics-l. Down below is an early incomplete draft of an email to
Aesthetics-l for Kate that I never sent. We'll see if Word is
incompatible
with Databack.
On Dec 29, 2012, at 4:00 PM, [email protected] wrote:
In a message dated 12/29/12 3:06:35 PM, [email protected] writes:
Pretty sure it's when you use something on your computer and then
copy
it to your email program.......
Good tip, Kate. Here's something not from Word, but from Final Draft,
the
progra,used by screenwriters and playwrights.
KIT
-- "Inert"? I'm not sure what you're after. What's that mean, "Words
and
names are inert"?
BREN
Suppose I write 'Aristotle' on a piece of paper. You believe that
scribble,
'Aristotle', is doing something. You believe that while it lies there,
there's mysterious, mystical activity going on called referring,
designating,
naming. Or you may say, "No-no, words can't refer, only people can."
So
statements can't be false, only staters can? Or would you ever call a
statement a
liar? [This is a test.}
In a message dated 12/9/12 12:10:24 PM, [email protected] writes:
A mark is not a word. A mark shaped to resemble a small part of
something is not intended to carry memories or notions and if the
viewer insists that it brings memories and notions he is not looking
at the mark itself in a field of other marks . He is you might say
missing the mark.
Kate Sullivan
Agreed -- a mark "is" not a word. But neither is anything else a word.
There's
no such thing as a mind-independent category of entities that "are"
words.
There are all sorts of sounds and scriptions that are CALLED words by
someone
or another on this globe, but "calling" something a "word" does not
make it
"BE" a "word". The notion of wordness is entirely a mental concoction.
As are,
for examples, nounness, verbness, adverbness etc. Stipulation is not
creation.
"Marks" can occasion notion in the mind of an observer just as those
things
you call words do. Consider all those marks mathematicians use to
convey plus,
minus, equals etc. People are convinced the marks "mean" something
because
they occasion similar notion in most observers, but in every instance
all
that's happening in the observers minds is a recollection of how the
mark was
used before. For example, an instructor at the front of the class may
talk
about the "square root" of a number until we get the idea. Eventually
he gets
around to introducing that peculiar mark, the "radical". When next we
see a
radical we remember much of what he said. What comes to mind when we
see the
radical are bits of our memory; it's an error to think that, each time
we see
a radical, the radical's "meaning" is shafted down into our head by a
bolt
from Plato's warehouse of "meanings".
When the painter paints a hand, we may consider it "a mark" or a series
of
marks but the painter is counting on the observer's memory. He counts
on his
mark being "recognized" as a hand, and look! how speckled and wrinkled
with age it is! Why would he put that hand on the babe in his Madonna
and
Child painting? What does it MEAN?
What the maker of a mark "intends" may be interesting, but the observer
does
not see an intention, they see the "mark" i.e. a line or color in
painting,
a word or phrase in poem, a note, melody, or trumpet in a music
composition.
Very, very often, the effects on the observer are essentially dependent
on the
observer's memory.
