joanna bujes wrote:
>
> At 06:11 PM 10/19/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> >for your next trick, perhaps you could intellectualize the act of farting.
>
> ...and for your next trick, perhaps you could try the art of thinking.
>
I missed the original post, but I suppose if the writer did try the art of thinking he/she would become aware that by putting farting into language it had already been intellectualized. It seems really difficult for some people to get a grasp on the _starting_ point for thinking about language, since they _either_ assume that there is no thinking prior to language _or_, as in the present case, they assume that one can use language without thinking.
A story an instructor at Michigan recounted some 45 years ago -- supposedly an actual incident his wife had reported to him. It seems that there was a University of Chicago professor of psychology who liked to embarass his female students. One woman in the front row often brought knitting to class. One day he asked her, Miss Smith, do you know that knitting is a sublimated form of masturbation. She replied, "When I knit, I knit; when I masturbate, I masturbate. And I know the difference." She could have added (had she known there were people who could not tell the difference between fucking and talking about fucking), "And when I talk about masturbating, I talk about it, and when I masturbate, I masturbate -- and I know that difference too." Apparently the poster you are responding to does not know the difference.
Kenneth Burke once remarked that if poems contained real instead of symbolic suns he would want to be quite a few million miles away from such a poem. It would probably be as difficult to get unintellectualized fucking into the movement of electrons on someone's monitor. :-)
Carrol