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Thomas Paikeday t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA
Tue Jun 25 02:04:09 UTC 2002


Thanks, Larry, for the learned comments. I know you are an expert in
this field.

About the website, I was in a bit of a hurry to have it uploaded to the
Internet. In a few days I hope to have a better version up and running,
with the phonetics (lost in the conversion from WordPerfect to Word)
corrected and the piece de resistance (Vulva v. vagina) in full form
instead of a passing reference in the "Un-trademark" affidavit.

Where could I take a look at your Sophia Linguistica article? It sounds
fascinating.

Sorry again for the hasty presentation.

Best regards.

TOM.

Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> At 12:55 PM -0400 6/21/02, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> >On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 12:49:41PM -0400, Steve Kl. wrote:
> >>  On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Thomas Paikeday wrote:
> >>
> >>  > "American and British dictionaries have no clear notion of the female
> >>  > genitals." Visit: www3.sympatico.ca/t.paikeday/index/htm. (Hint: click
> >>  > "Trademark Affidavits").
> >>
> >>  I couldn't access this page.
> >>
> >>  Is the URL right?
> >
> >No, it should end in "index.htm"
> >                            ^
> >
> Very nice treatments.  I've actually written papers on both lexical
> clones (Tom's page 3) and un-nouns (his page 4), and heartily endorse
> the gist of his presentations here, although I've argued that each of
> the constructions is somewhat more complex that what Tom is able to
> provide in his affidavits (I'd better, since I've devoted a whole lot
> more ink/electrons to these constructions in my format than Tom could
> do in his).  In particular, I've divided (in "Un-Covering the
> Un-Word", published in the Japanese journal Sophia Linguistica 49
> (2002): 1-64) the class of un-nouns into two groups, the A (for
> "Almost")-class un-noun, in which an unX is almost (but not quite) a
> member of the category X, as in "un-cola" or "un-petroleum lip jelly"
> (my cite is not quite the same as Tom's but close--
>
> "Un-Petroleum(TM) Lip Jelly(TM)
> Un-Chap® your lips"
> (Label on product manufactured by Autumn Harp, Bristol, Vermont)
>
> --and I wonder whether this is indeed the company to which Tom refers
> in his affidavit), vs. the B (for "Barely")-class un-noun, in which
> an unY is indeed a member of the category Y, but not a prototype
> member (in Rosch's sense), i.e. not a Y Y.  There are some nice
> examples that oppose a B-class un-noun with a lexical clone, as in:
>
> Undesign:  Moving Away from Aggressive Décor
> (NYT headline, 2 June 1988, C6)
> "Nothing is 'design designed'.  Nothing has a signature."
> -New York architect Diana Agrest
>
> or, for that matter, an anti-clone like the "un-diet diet".
>
> --larry



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