"yeah, yeah" again (another version)

[Laurence Horn]

On Jul 21, 2012, at 4:55 AM, Garson O'Toole wrote:

> Here is another version of the anecdote:
>
> Title: Political economy and international economics
> Author: Jagdish N Bhagwati; Douglas A Irwin
> Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press
> Year: 1991
> http://books.google.com/books?id=E7Lzix812RcC&q=yeah#v=snippet&
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> I must recall the embarrassing moment for Noam Chomsky, the celebrated
> linguist, who asserted in a public lecture that, in every human
> language, two negatives make a positive but two positives do not make
> a negative only to have my good friend, the philosopher Sidney
> Morgenbesser, shout from the back of the room in rich Yiddish: "Yeah,
> yeah?"
> [End excerpt]
>
Wonder what this says about the editorial process at MIT Press.  I think I'll try to slip this into print and see if anyone notices:

==================
Imagine Aristotle's humiliation when--declaiming his Prior Analytics, Chapter 46 in the agora--he asserted that to not be a not-white log was not necessarily to be a log, when the young Sidney Morgenbesser, visiting from Columbia on his junior year abroad, called out from the rear of the crowd in Yiddish-accented Greek "[nai nai]".
==================

LH

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