Browsing the NYT Archives

[Joel S. Berson]

Is the "quotation" given by the NYT Archives writer the
transformation of a metaphor into a literality?

''Michael Jordan represents the basketball court"  ["on" deleted]
means that he is the epitome of great basketball (what, I think,
Wilson had in mind).  Metaphor, with "basketball court" metonymy for
"game of basketball"?

''Michael Jordan represents on the basketball court" means that he is
literally representing something (the object of the transitive verb
being left unspecified) while he is (standing, running, jumping) on
the basketball court.

Joel

At 4/5/2014 03:30 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

>REPRESENT: to do something well. ''Michael Jordan represents on the
>basketball court.''
>
>http://goo.gl/AAjV3T
>
>No, it does not. It means much more than that. It means "to represent." It
>means to represent in the sense of presenting oneself to the relevant
>subset of the outside world in a manner that will bring honor, glory,
>prestige, and respect to someone or to something that you care deeply
>about, whether it be yourself, your family, your 'hood, your school, your
>city, your state, your team, Black America, or the entire United States of
>  America. Needless to say, in his glory days, Michael Jordan did all of
>this on the basket ball court. All athletes do their things well. But only
>some of them "represent" in the relevant sense. Tiger Woods once
>represented, but he has long since "done fell off."
>
>It takes only a trivial amount of thought to see that the NYT definition is
>utter nonsense. When a rapper raps., "I represents my city," he can't
>*possibly* mean, "I perform my city well."
>
>Back in '78, as he was preparing to fight Saint Louis's own Leon Spinks,
>Muhammad Ali sneered that Spinks was "too ugly to represent the colored
>people." Clearly, he wasn't saying that Spinks was too ugly to perform the
>colored people well.
>
>BTW, to see what motivated this insulting but, sadly, accurate observation,
>google-image "leon spinks teeth." Brother Leon really did look as though
>he'd been hit is face with the "Ugly" stick or had been in a stick fight
>and everybody had a stick but him.
>
>As for the quote, the sole Google cite contains total bullshit.
>
>--
>-Wilson
>-----
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-Mark Twain
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org