Whadda hell?

[Chris F Waigl]

George Thompson wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Whadda hell?
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>
> 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

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