Quote: I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members (antedating Groucho attrib 1949 October 20)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Mar 25 19:13:54 UTC 2011


At 11:15 AM -0400 3/25/11, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>Garson,
>
>First of all, thanks for your antedating of the Groucho Marx quote,
>which I consider to be one of the towering sayings of the modern era.
>
>Do you have a citation for the Bertrand Russell telegram?
>
>Fred

I suspect there wasn't any actual telegraph of that sort.  We were
just being droll...

Russell's paradox, from the early years of the last century--
cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox for one take
--hinges on the problem of characterizing the set of all sets that
are not members of themselves--such a set can neither be a member of
itself nor not be.  Among other things, the impossibility of a
consistent characterization of such sets led to a major and indeed
insoluble problem for Frege's (1877) Begriffsschrift, as Russell was
pleased to point out to Frege.  Another classic version is whether a
barber who shaves everyone in the town who doesn't shave themself
shaves himself or not--in fact, neither is a possibility.  Or the
Cretan who claimed that all Cretans always lie, and thus can neither
be lying (without also telling the truth) nor telling the truth
(without also lying).  (Whence "the Liar" as a cover term for such
paradoxes.) But no telegrams were involved in these cases either.

And speaking of the unattestable Groucho wire, does this belong to
the same set of apocryphal telegrams as the Cary Grant one we've
discussed previously?

Telegram to CG vacationing in France:  HOW OLD CARY GRANT
Reply telegram from CG:                      OLD CARY GRANT FINE STOP HOW YOU



LH
>
>
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
>Garson O'Toole [adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM]
>Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 9:38 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: Quote: I don't want to belong to any club that would
>accept              me as one of its members (antedating Groucho
>attrib 1949 October              20)
>
>LH wrote
>>  Of course he was ripping off Bertrand Russell, who said (almost) the
>>  same thing (mutatis mutandis).  And those admittedly perennially
>>  lying Cretans.
>
>Yes, Bertrand sent a similar telegram when resigning from the club of
>all clubs that do not list themselves on their membership roster. He
>claimed that he was trying to save the Universe from contradiction,
>but today many think he was simply trying to embarrass fellow member
>Gottlob Frege.
>Garson
>
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