Michael Dawson wrote:
> [clip]
> I was told to fuck off about all this, but this ridiculous topic is very
> near to making me quit this whole fucking list.
Your privilege.
> Meanwhile, we're
> working on blowing our own species off the map, and "leftists" are doing
> this kind of crap.
And so there will be no more cakes and ale? (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, quote from memory)
> I accuse all you who are promulgating this "AI" bullshit of this: You like
> to sound like experts about inscrutible topics. You like short-cuts to
> "radicalism."
Do tell. I guess that's how the cookie crumbles, as they used to say in the '50s.
> You think your pseudo-intellectual techno-worship ("andie
> nachgeborenen" admits s/he doesn't know how computers work, but brags about
> having "made a career" out of this kind of diversionary techno-jerking-off)
> makes you gigher and better. You are in this "left" thing for your own
> petty and tiny egos.
Feels good doesn't it? :-)
You're missing out on what has probably been the primary use of language since before its invention. (Read some anthropology to find out how that -- using language before its invention -- might be possible.) It's a mode of recognizing each others' humanity, a use of language prior even to screaming about how the world is ending if we don't shape up on this here maillist pronto. It's called the phatic use. See below.
Carrol
-From the OED:
_phatic_, a
Of or pertaining to speech or verbal expression; spec. in phatic communion, a term applied by B. Malinowski (see MALINOWSKIAN a.) to speech communication as used to establish social relationships rather than to impart information. Hence used gen. to denote formal or trivial verbal contact.
1923 B. MALINOWSKI in Ogden & Richards Meaning of Meaning 478 There can be no doubt that we have here a new type of linguistic usephatic communion I am tempted to call it, actuated by the demon of terminological inventiona type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words. 1929 I. A. RICHARDS Pract. Crit. IV. i. 318 It would be an excellent thing if all the critical chitchat..were universally recognised to be what it is, social gesture, ‘phatic communion’. 1942 T. C. POLLOCK Nature of Lit. ix. 167 Phatic communion is one of the important ways in which men use language. 1954 W. LA BARRE Human Animal xv. 306 A surprisingly large part of every culture is merely the phatic sharing of common emotional burdens, and has no relevance at all to the outside world. 1959 20th Cent. Nov. 379 The magic words of phatic chat that fell from my falsely smiling lips. 1964 Listener 15 Oct. 603/3 How many of the youthful roarers of Parry's Jerusalem know that Blake's ‘dark satanic mills’ are not factories but churches?.. But the whole evening was warmly phatic, providing an image of British teenagers as less delinquent than jingoistic. 1971 J. SPENCER Eng. Lang. W. Afr. 29 Phatic expressions and greeting and leave-taking formulae never precisely match across cultural borders. 1972 Scholarly Publishing Apr. 282/2 The reader on a committee who blandly and thoughtlessly says, ‘You really ought to get this study published’ (in the same phatic way he says, ‘Good morning’). 1976 Archivum Linguisticum VII. 86 Those illocutionary acts for which there might seem, on the face of it, to be no propositional content at all: ‘greet’ for example..or ‘phatic communion’ of various sorts. 1977 Time 21 Mar. 67/1 Many Western ears will find it hard to tell whether Merwin is being vatic or phatic.