Whadda hell?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Oct 10 23:00:07 UTC 2006


>George Thompson wrote:
>
>>  ---------------------- Information from the 
>>mail header -----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
>>  Subject:      Whadda hell?
>> 
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  An article in today's Science Times ("A Dangerous Fat and Its
>>  Dangerous Alternative") has the following paragraph:
>>  For restaurant patrons who long ago learned to avoid butter and skip
>>  the bacon, all this amounts to a Hobbesian dilemma.  Better saturated
>>  fat, the heart-stopping devil you know?  Or trans fat, the heart-
>>  stopping devil you've jsut been introduced to?
>>  NY Times, October 10, 2006, Section F, p. 8, col. 6
>>
>>  I know very little about Thomas Hobbes, and nothing at all about
>>  anyone else named Hobbes whose notions, maybe, are being cited here.
>>  I certainly don't know what Thomas Hobbes had to say about dilemmas.
>>  Is the writer thinking of a "Hobson's choice"?  Which of course is
>>  muddled too, since "Hobson's choice" isn't a difficult choice between
>>  equally bad options, but no choise at all: take it or leave it.
>>
>>  Google's never heard of "Hobbesian dilemma" or "Hobbesian choice"
>>  or "Hobbes choice", either.
>>
>Google has something. I remember having exchanged a few e-mails with
>Mark Liberman about this some time ago -- it seemed to me that users
>were grasping for an English equivalent of the French choix cornélien,
>different from the classical Hobson's choice between something
>sub-standard and nothing at all. Googling... here's the Language Log
>posting http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001909.html .
>
>Chris Waigl
>
We've discussed it here as well.  See e.g. this 
post from Kathleen Miller in 2003:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0307b&L=ads-l&P=2816

LH

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