Posted by dorayme on 01/29/08 23:20

In article <Xns9A349F6545560nanopandaneredbojias@85.214.90.236>,
Neredbojias <monstersquasher@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:15:37
> GMT dorayme scribed:
>
> >> > Ah Boji, you very significantly don't say what a bottomless cup
> >> > is. Most of us would have no trouble, it is *a bottomless cup*.
> >> > But all you can say is "Nope". I do understand your predicament.
> >> > Having eschewed a perfectly natural form of words, you are at a
> >> > loss to describe such a cup.
> >>
> >> A cup needs a bottom to be a cup. Is that unreasonable?
> >
> > Not really, no. What would you call the cups I have previously
> > described without being silly? Would you make up your own terms?
>
> Well, I might call the "punishment cup" a groin-drencher. Does that
> help?
>

This is supposed to be a non-silly answer?

> > I can see that you have no patience or stomach for the enquiries
> > I have made to you to explore a distinction you yourself made.
> > There is no need to explain why this is so, I accept all
> > responsibility.
>
> It's nice to see a woman who admits she's wrong when she's wrong at least
> some of the time.
>

I was trying to be courteous to you. You are greatly
misunderstand many things.

> > For anyone else that might be interested (highly unlikely to be
> > many <g>): The idea that a cup without a bottom is still a cup is
> > not some sort of joke. It is the serious point that if you do not
> > call it a cup, you have lost a perfectly proper and natural way
> > of describing it. This point is an objection to the common
> > practice of avoiding real issues by red herrings about words.
>
> Who said one couldn't call it a cup? But what you call it and what it
> is...
>

The question is not about what we *can* call something. It is
about what it ought to be called. We both can agree that a cup
without a bottom is a rather different object, with a different
purpose to a cup with a bottom. The question still arises about
the status of the bottom in the cup that does have a bottom vis a
vis the distinction between engineering and design.


> > The point of probing the distinction between design and
> > engineering is to see what the true ingredients are of a designed
> > object, to distinguish in it the various aspects. These aspects
> > can be divorced from the actual histories and psychology of the
> > object and its creators.
>
> Since when does an inanimate object have a psychology? Hast thee been
> perusing too many cartoon teleshows of late?

Please add a "respectively" in the sentence:

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual histories and
psychology of - respectively - the object and its creators."

or better still parse it into:

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual histories the
object."

and

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual psychology of its
creators."

--
dorayme

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