"it's turtles all they way down"

Alice Faber faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU
Sun Nov 19 04:44:03 UTC 2006


Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 9:26 AM -0800 11/18/06, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>> On Nov 18, 2006, at 8:48 AM, Stephen Goranson wrote:
>>
>>> good Yale Book of Quotations quotes Stephen Hawking's 1988 version
>>> of a story an
>>>  an audience member objection to an astronomer's cosmological
>>> description. A
>>> lady sareplied that the world rests on a giant tortoise. When
>>> challenged on
>>> what the tortoise stood on, she explained "it's turtles all the way
>>> down." YBQ
>>> adds that this may have been told earlier by Bertrand Russell,
>>> which sounds
>>> reasonable (I think I've encountered that attribution, perhaps in his
>>> Autobiography?).
>>
>> Haj Ross (J.R. Ross) tells the turtles version (attributed to William
>> James)  at the beginning of his 1967 Ph.D. dissertation, Constraints
>> on Variables in Syntax.
>>
> coises, foiled again
>

Shouldn't that be "couses, furled again"?
--
======================================================================
Alice Faber                                     faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                          tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                             fax (203) 865-8963

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